President Droupadi Murmu, on Monday, October 12, appointed governors for six states, naming Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar as the full-time Governor of Tamil Nadu and transferring Sikkim Governor Om Prakash Mathur to Keralam. Sudha Yadav has been appointed Governor of Karnataka, Dushyant Gautam will take charge in Sikkim, Braj Mohan Ram has been appointed Governor of Odisha and Dhal Singh Bisen will be the new Governor of Uttarakhand.
According to a communique issued by the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the appointments will take effect from the dates on which the appointees assume charge of their respective offices.
Arlekar, who was serving as the Governor of Keralam, had been holding additional charge of Tamil Nadu since March 12, 2026, following the appointment of RN Ravi as Governor of West Bengal. His appointment formalises his position as the full-time Governor of Tamil Nadu.
Arlekar assumed office as the Governor of Keralam on January 2, 2025. Before that, he served as Governor of Bihar and Himachal Pradesh. He was appointed Governor of Himachal Pradesh in July 2021 and assumed charge as Bihar Governor in February 2023.
A former Speaker of the Goa Legislative Assembly, Arlekar held the position from 2012 to 2017. During his tenure, the Goa Assembly became the first state legislature in the country to adopt a paperless system. He has also served as Goa's Minister for Forest and Environment and Panchayati Raj.
Mathur, a veteran Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader and former Rajya Sabha member from Rajasthan, will succeed Arlekar as the Governor of Keralam. He was appointed Governor of Sikkim in July 2024 and assumed office that month.
Mathur served two terms in the Rajya Sabha between 2008 and 2022 and has held several organisational positions in the BJP, including national vice-president and general secretary. He has also been associated with the party's election management in several states.
Among the four new appointments, Sudha Yadav has been named Governor of Karnataka, succeeding Thaawarchand Gehlot, who had held the office since July 2021.
Yadav is a former BJP Member of Parliament from Mahendragarh in Haryana, representing the constituency in the Lok Sabha from 1999 to 2004. She entered electoral politics after her husband, Border Security Force Deputy Commandant Sukhbir Singh Yadav, was killed in the line of duty during the Kargil War.
She won the Mahendragarh Lok Sabha seat by a margin of 1.39 lakh votes against Rao Inderjit Singh. She later served as the national in-charge of the BJP's Other Backward Classes (OBC) Morcha in 2015 and was a member of the National Commission for Backward Classes from 2019 to 2022.
Yadav joined the BJP Parliamentary Board, the party's highest decision-making body, on August 17, 2022. She was the second woman to serve on the board after former Union Minister Sushma Swaraj.
Dushyant Gautam, a former BJP national general secretary and Rajya Sabha member, has been appointed Governor of Sikkim, succeeding Mathur. Gautam has held several positions in the BJP, including national president of the party's Scheduled Caste Morcha. He began his political career as a councillor in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and later entered the Rajya Sabha.
Braj Mohan Ram, a former Lok Sabha MP from Palamu in Jharkhand, has been appointed Governor of Odisha. He will succeed Hari Babu Kambhampati, who assumed office in January 2025.
Ram represented Palamu in the Lok Sabha in 1996, 1998 and 1999. He has also served as an MLA in undivided Bihar and has been associated with organisations working for Scheduled Caste communities.
Dhal Singh Bisen, a former Lok Sabha MP from Balaghat in Madhya Pradesh, has been appointed Governor of Uttarakhand. He succeeds Lieutenant General (retired) Gurmit Singh, whose tenure began on September 15, 2021, and ended in September 2026.
Bisen has served four terms as an MLA and was a minister in the Madhya Pradesh government, handling portfolios including school education, forests, transport and mines. He is an Ayurveda practitioner by profession.
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