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Former Union minister Manoj Sinha has been appointed lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir. A communique issued by Rashtrapati Bhavan said Girish Chandra Murmu’s resignation as J&K lieutenant governor has been accepted.
He was elected to the Lok Sabha for the first time in 1996 and re-elected in 1999. He was a member of the BJP national council from 1989 to 1996.
Elected to the Lok Sabha for a third term in 2014, he was appointed minister of state for railways in Prime Minister Modi’s ministry and later held independent charge of the ministry of communication.
Earlier, Girish Chandra Murmu, a 1985 batch IAS officer, had abruptly submitted his resignation on Wednesday night on the day the Union Territory marked the first anniversary of the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution, which scrapped Jammu and Kashmir’s special status.
The 60-year-old former IAS officer of the Gujarat cadre had on October 29 last year taken over as the first LG of the union territory after the state of Jammu and Kashmir was downgraded and sliced into two UTs, the other one being Ladakh.
