Satya Pal Malik appointed as the new Governor of Meghalaya

Guwahati: Satya Pal Malik has been appointed as the Governor of Meghalaya. He replaces Tathagata Roy, who completed his five-year tenure on the post in the northeastern state, a Rashtrapati Bhavan communique said on Tuesday.

The Rashtrapati Bhavan communique said that Bhagat Singh Koshyari, Governor of Maharashtra, has been asked to discharge the functions of the Goa Governor in addition to his own duties.

Roy completed his five-year tenure by serving as governor of Tripura for three years and the remaining in Meghalaya. Satya Pal Malik was the governor of Jammu and Kashmir from August 2018 to October 2019.

Malik was appointed as the Goa Governor in October last year soon after Parliament passed the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill, as per which the state was bifurcated into two Union territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

Malik during his tenure in Jammu and Kashmir stoked a controversy after he claimed that he did not receive a letter from political parties staking claim to form the government in the former state after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) coalition government fell. He later claimed that the fax machine in Raj Bhavan was not working.

In Goa too, he vetoed the government's proposal to construct a new Raj Bhavan and said the construction should be put off till the state's financial condition improves. Calling it "irrational and imprudent", Malik said the state was suffering from the impact of the pandemic and thus, such expenses should be put off.

Satya Pal Malik was first elected to the Rajya Sabha, representing the Lok Dal, in 1980. He was also elected to the Rajya Sabha as a Congress leader back in 1986. Malik would go on to join the BJP and was elected to the Lok Sabha in 2005.

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