RN Ravi to take oath as West Bengal Governor today
Kolkata: Former Intelligence Bureau (IB) top officer and the ex-Governor of Tamil Nadu, R.N. Ravi, will be sworn in as the new governor of West Bengal on Thursday.
Ravi arrived in Kolkata late Wednesday evening, and his oath ceremony will be conducted at 11.30 a.m. at Lok Bhavan (formerly Raj Bhavan). The Chief Justice of the Calcutta High Court, Sujoy Paul, will administer the oath.
The oath ceremony of the new governor will be one of the few rare occasions where the West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, and the Leader of Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly, Suvendu Adhikari, will be present.
Ravi is the second IB super-cop to be sworn in as a West Bengal Governor in the last one and a half decades. Before the crucial Assembly elections in West Bengal 2011, which marked the end of the 34-year-long Left Front regime and the beginning of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress command, the former IB chief and also the former National Security Adviser (NSA), M.K. Narayanan, was sworn in as the then governor.
Political observers said that this could be just a matter of coincidence that the appointment of Ravi as the new Governor of West Bengal is also happening when the state is heading for the crucial Assembly elections.
Ravi’s appointment as the new West Bengal Governor was preceded by the sudden resignation of his predecessor, C.V. Ananda Bose, on the evening of March 5.
Bose’s sudden resignation, and that too before the Assembly elections, created ripples in the political circles in the state, with the ruling Trinamool Congress citing pressure from the Union government as the reason for his resignation. Bose himself nullified these hearsays and described his resignation as his voluntary decision.
Since Bose’s resignation, Mamata Banerjee has been claiming that she was shocked by his sudden quitting and also accused the Union Ministry of Home Affairs of announcing the appointment of Ravi as Bose’s successor without consulting her.
“The 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,” the Chief Minister said, stressing that such action undermined the spirit of the Constitution of India and struck at the very foundation of the country’s federal structure.