Manoj Sinha will be the new Lieutenant Governor of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, after President Ram Nath Kovind accepted the resignation of incumbent Girish Chandra Murmu.
According to an NDTV report, Murmu is now the frontrunner for the post of the country's new auditor. He had been appointed as the first LG of the newly-formed Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir last year.
Incidentally, Sinha's appointment comes exactly a year after the special status of Jammu and Kashmir was revoked under Article 370, and the process to bifurcate the state into two UTs (J&K and Ladakh) was kickstarted.
Who is Manoj Sinha?
Manoj Sinha is known to be a grassroots-level politician with a bachelors and masters degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Benaras Hindu University (BHU) campus.
Before joining active politics, he was the President of the Students' Union at BHU.
A parliamentary politician, Sinha was elected to Lok Sabha, on a BJP ticket, for the first time in 1996, from the Ghazipur constituency in Uttar Pradesh. He thereafter got re-elected from the same constituency in 1999 and 2014.
In his 2014 term, he was also appointed as the Minister of State for the Railways under the Modi government.
After a reshuffle of the Cabinet in 2016, he was also made Minister of State (Independent Charge) of the Communications Ministry.
Sinha, however, lost his seat in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).
A 2017 report by The New Indian Express describes Sinha as a "an agriculturalist at heart and a silent performer who consciously maintains a low profile." The report also calls Sinha one of the "best performing members of Parliament in the 13th Lok Sabha in 1999.
In 2017, before the Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, he was also considered a frontrunner for the post of chief minister, but eventually lost the chair to Yogi Adityanath.
Sinha's appointment is being seen as an attempt by the BJP to give a political touch to the J&K administration, which Murmu, a bureaucrat, could not bring to the table.
(With inputs from NDTV and The New Indian Express)
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