Kerala governor Sheila Dikshit’s meeting with Rajnath Singh suggests she may resign soon

NEW DELHI: Amid reports that she may be shunted out of Kerala, governor Sheila Dikshit on Monday met home minister Rajnath Singh.

She will also meet President Pranab Mukherjee in the evening, fuelling speculation that she may put in her papers.

During her 15-minute meeting with the home minister, Dikshit is understood to have discussed about her continuation in the Thiruvananthapuram Raj Bhavan, sources said.
But details of the discussion are not known.

“These are all rumours,” she told reporters, after her meeting with the home minister, when asked whether she would resign as Kerala governor. Dikshit is said to have refused to quit after the NDA government had allegedly nudged her to resign.

There have been reports that suggested that the former Delhi chief minister may be transferred to a state in the northeast.

On Sunday, Maharashtra governor K Sankaranarayanan resigned after he was transferred to Mizoram for the remainder of his tenure till 2017.

Sankaranarayanan too was nudged by Union home secretary Anil Goswami to put in his papers after the Narendra Modi government came to power. Earlier, the NDA government had sacked Mizoram governor Kamla Beniwal, who had served in Gujarat earlier and had a running battle with Narendra Modi when he was the state’s chief minister.

Virendra Kataria, a former Congress leader, was also sacked as Puducherry lieutenant governor last month. Four other governors, M K Narayanan (West Bengal), Ashwani Kumar (Nagaland), B L Joshi (UP) and Shekhar Dutt (Chhattisgarh) had put in their papers apparently after they were telephoned by the Union Home Secretary.

Uttrakhand governor Aziz Qureshi has challenged Modi government’s moves to ease him out of office, bringing the controversy over removal of UPA-appointed governors under judicial lens.