CV Anand Bose (left) and RN Ravi (right). file | Photo courtesy: The Hindu
Tamil Nadu Governor RN Ravi was appointed the Governor of West Bengal on Thursday (March 5, 2026), while Kerala Governor Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar was given additional charge of Tamil Nadu ahead of assembly elections in the crucial state.
According to official information received from Rashtrapati Bhavan, Himachal Pradesh Governor Shiv Pratap Shukla has been appointed the Governor of Telangana, while Telangana Governor Jishnu Dev Verma will become the Governor of Maharashtra. Nand Kishore Yadav has been appointed the Governor of Nagaland and Lieutenant General (retd) Syed Ata Hasnain has been named the Governor of Bihar. Delhi Lieutenant Governor Vinay Kumar Saxena has been named the Lieutenant Governor of Ladakh, while Taranjit Singh Sandhu will become the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi.
West Bengal Governor CV Anand Bose and Ladakh Lieutenant Governor Kavinder Gupta resigned on Thursday (March 5, 2026). Shri Gupta will take over as the Governor of Himachal Pradesh.
Mr Gupta was appointed as the LG of Ladakh in July 2025. His tenure witnessed unprecedented violence in Leh city on September 24, 2025, 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 the Tamil Nadu Governor and the MK Stalin government have been strained and the ruling DMK has accused the Governor of projecting himself as a political rival of the elected government. Mr Ravi withheld his assent to several bills, following which the Supreme Court used powers to declare the 10 bills “effectively approved” in April 2025. He repeatedly walked out of the assembly without reading the traditional address or deviating from the text prepared by the government. He once declared that he would never approve the NEET exemption bill.
Incidentally, it was on the suggestion of Shri Ravi that the name of Raj Bhavan was changed to Lok Bhawan a few months ago. Mr Ravi, a former Indian Police Service officer who retired from the Intelligence Bureau, has also been the negotiator of the Naga peace talks from 2014-2021.
Mr Bose, who has held the post for the last three-and-a-half years, submitted his resignation to President Draupadi Murmu in Delhi.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that Union Home Minister Amit Shah called her and informed her about Mr. Ravi’s appointment. She said she was “shocked and deeply concerned by the news of Mr Bose’s sudden resignation”.
Ms Banerjee said, “The Union Home Minister just told me that Shri RN Ravi is being appointed as the Governor of West Bengal. He never consulted me in this regard as per the established tradition.”
The Chief Minister said that though he did not know the reasons for the resignation, he “would not be surprised if some pressure was put on the Governor by the Union Home Minister to serve some political interests on the eve of the upcoming state assembly elections.”
He said such actions undermine the spirit of the Constitution and “strike at the foundation of our federal structure.”
published – March 05, 2026 11:13 PM IST