Omar Abdullah has intriguing first response to Manoj Sinha's appointment as J&K's new L-G

After former Union minister and BJP leader Manoj Sinha's appointment as the new Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir, former CM of the erstwhile state and NC leader Omar Abdullah on Thursday said that last night there were one or two names that people were circulating as a "done deal" and Sinha's name wasn't among them.

'Unexpected name out of the hat'

Abdullah, however, did not disclose the names that were circulating and said, "You can always trust this government to pull an unexpected name out of the hat contrary to anything the “sources” had planted earlier."

President Ram Nath Kovind has accepted the resignation of Girish Chandra Murmu as the LG of Jammu and Kashmir. Murmu resigned exactly one year after the state of Jammu and Kashmir was bifurcated into two Union territories, the other one being Ladakh.

Murmu was the first Lt Governor of Jammu and Kashmir after it was made a Union Territory last year. Earlier on Wednesday, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief Northern Command Lt Gen YK Joshi met Murmu at the Raj Bhavan and discussed various issues pertaining to the prevailing security scenario in the Union Territory

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About J&K's new Lieutenant Governor

The 61-year-old Sinha was born on July 1, 1959, in Mohanpura of Ghazipur district of eastern UP and has been actively involved in working for the backward villages of eastern Uttar Pradesh. His political career started when he was elected the president of Banaras Hindu University Students Union in 1982. He was elected to the Lok Sabha for the first time in 1996 and repeated the term in 1999.

Sinha has been a member of the BJP national council from 1989 to 1996. He was elected to the Lower House for a third term in national politics when the BJP swept the Lok Sabha elections in 2014. He was former Minister of State for Railways and later held an independent charge of Ministry of Communication. He was defeated by Bahujan Samaj Party’s (BSP) Afzal Ansari in last year’s Lok Sabha polls.

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