New Delhi: Former Jammu and Kashmir governor Satyapal Malik has died at a hospital here after prolonged illness, his personal staff said on Tuesday. He was 79.
Malik, who had also held the positions of governor of Goa, Bihar, Meghalaya, and Odisha, besides being a member of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha in his long political career, died at 1.12 pm at the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital here.
He was in the ICU of the hospital for a long time, getting treatment for various ailments, the staff said.
Veteran politician Satyapal Malik’s five-decade-long political career spanned across multiple political parties and included several high-profile gubernatorial appointments before he transitioned into an outspoken critic of the very establishment he had served.
He served as the governor of four states — Bihar (2017), Jammu and Kashmir (2018), Goa (2019), and Meghalaya (2020). But his most impactful assignment commenced in August 2018, when he was named the governor of Jammu and Kashmir.
The tenure saw two significant events — the 2019 Pulwama attack in which 40 CRPF personnel lost their lives, and the August 5, 2019 revocation of Article 370 and the division of the erstwhile state into two Union Territories—Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh. Malik was the last governor of the state of Jammu and Kashmir.
Though he rose to prominence as a loyalist in the BJP, his recent years have been characterised by his vociferous condemnation of the central government’s policies, reworking his public image from that of a seasoned administrator to that of a vocal dissident.
From J-K, he had been relocated to Goa, where his relationship with the state government soured as he was openly critical of its COVID-19 response and accused it of corruption. His term in Goa came to an abrupt halt and he was posted to Meghalaya, his final assignment.
On retirement from governorship, he publicly confronted the central government over crucial matters, which included a contention that the Pulwama attack was an outcome of governmental indifference, and vocally backed the farmers’ protests against the three central laws, contending that the government had not listened to them.
During his last days of life, Malik was also named in the CBI chargesheets filed in May this year in connection with the alleged corruption in the Rs 2,200 crore Kiru Hydro power project. He strongly refuted the charges from his hospital bed, calling it “political vendetta”.
Malik was born on July 24, 1946, in the Baghpat district of Uttar Pradesh.
His political journey started as a student leader with socialist ideology but his career was later characterised by party hopping as he switched from the Bharatiya Kranti Dal (BKD) to the Congress, then the Janata Dal and finally the BJP.