Days ahead of polls, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal to get new Governors

Tamil Nadu Governor R. N. Ravi was on Thursday (March 5, 2026) appointed the Governor of West Bengal while Kerala Governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar was given additional charge of Tamil Nadu ahead of Assembly polls in the crucial States.

According to an official communication from the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Shiv Pratap Shukla, Governor of Himachal Pradesh, has been appointed the Governor of Telangana, while Jishnu Dev Varma, Governor of Telangana, will become the Governor of Maharashtra. Nand Kishore Yadav has been appointed the Governor of Nagaland and Lt. General (retired) Syed Ata Hasnain has been named the Governor of Bihar. Vinai Kumar Saxena, the Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi, has been named the Lieutenant-Governor of Ladakh, while Taranjit Singh Sandhu will become the Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi.

West Bengal Governor C.V. Ananda Bose and Ladakh Lieutenant-Governor Kavinder Gupta resigned on Thursday (March 5, 2026). Mr. Gupta will take charge as the Governor of Himachal Pradesh.

Mr. Gupta was appointed as Ladakh’s L-G in July 2025. His tenure witnessed unprecedented violence on September 24, 2025, in Leh city in which four people, including a Kargil war veteran, were killed in police firing when a protest demanding constitutional safeguards for the region turned violent.

Relations between Tamil Nadu Governor and the M.K. Stalin government have been stormy with the ruling DMK accusing the former of positioning himself as a political rival to an elected government. Mr. Ravi withheld assent to several Bills following which the Supreme Court had in April 2025 invoked powers to declare 10 Bills “effectively approved”. He had also repeatedly walked out of the Assembly without reading out the customary address or digressed from the government’s prepared text. He had once declared that given to himself, he would never approve the NEET exemption Bill.

Incidentally, it was on Mr. Ravi’s suggestion that the name of the Raj Bhavan was changed to Lok Bhavan a few months ago. Mr. Ravi, a former Indian Police Service officer who retired from the Intelligence Bureau, has also been the interlocutor for the Naga peace talks from 2014-2021.

Mr. Bose, who has been in the position for the past three-and-a-half years, submitted his resignation to President Droupadi Murmu in Delhi.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that Union Home Minister Amit Shah called her and informed about Mr. Ravi’s appointment. She said that she was “shocked and deeply concerned by the sudden news of the resignation” of Mr. Bose.

“Union Home Minister just informed me that Shri R.N. Ravi is being appointed as Governor of West Bengal. He never consulted with me as per the established convention in this regard,” Ms. Banerjee said.

The Chief Minister said that though she did not know the reasons for the resignation, she “would not be surprised if the Governor has been subjected to some pressure from the Union Home Minister to serve certain political interests on the eve of the forthcoming State Assembly elections.”

She added that such actions undermine the spirit of the Constitution and “strike at the very foundation of our federal structure.”