Three leaders from eastern Uttar Pradesh feature in the list of 13 Governors appointed or reshuffled by President Droupadi Murmu on Sunday. While newly appointed Sikkim Governor Lakshman Prasad Acharya is a member of the state Legislative Council, new Himachal Pradesh Governor Shiv Pratap Shukla is a former Union minister. Bihar Governor Phagu Chauhan, a former UP minister, has been moved to Meghalaya, where Assembly elections will be held on February 27. Lakshman Prasad Acharya (68) Born in the Ramnagar area of Varanasi, Acharya, currently an MLC, joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevk Sangh (RSS) at a very young age. He worked as a teacher in RSS-run Bharatia Shishu MAndir in Ramnagar for two years. In 1973, he was arrested over an agitation against the Simla Agreement. He later served as a general secretary of the Ramnagar unit of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. (VHP). In 1990, he entered active politics after being appointed the BJP mandal president. Later, he also served as district general secretary and district president of the BJP’s Varanasi unit. For three years, he was chairman of UP Fisheries Development Corporation. In 2004, he was appointed the state president of the party’s Scheduled Tribe (ST) Morcha. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi contested his first Lok Sabha election from Varanasi in 2014, Acharya was the party’s Kashi regional unit president. The position in the legislative council was the only public office he had held till his appointment as Governor. When his appointment was announced, Acharya was attending a mass wedding programme in Varanasi. Sources in the party said Modi trusts him a lot. When the PM opened his constituency office in Varanasi, Acharya was among the leaders deployed there to address the grievances of visitors, according to insiders. Shiv Pratap Shukla (70) The new Himachal Governor is from Gorakhpur district. His initiation into politics was through the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and he was later elected the students’ union vice-president of Gorakhpur University. Shukla was elected MLA for the first time in 1989 from Gorakhpur Sadar and he represented the constituency in UP Assembly for another three terms. His tenure as the legislator turned Gorakhpur into a BJP stronghold. But, in 2002, he lost to Radha Mohan Das Agarwal who had contested as a candidate of the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha with the support of the then local MP, Yogi Adityanath. Agarwal is a Rajya Sabah MP at present. After decades in politics, he was moved to national politics in 2016 when he was appointed to the Rajya Sabha. A year later, Shukla was inducted into the Union Cabinet as the Minister of State for Finance. But, he lost his place in the Cabinet formed after the parliamentary elections in 2019. But Shukla’s influence in state politics did not wane completely despite his move to national politics. In December 2021, the BJP’s central leadership formed a four-member committee under him to draw a strategy and list of programmes to reach out to the Brahmin community and convince them to support the BJP in the 2022 Assembly elections. Phagu Chauhan (75) A prominent Other Backward Classes (OBC) leader from eastern UP, Chauhan was appointed Bihar Governor in July 2019, a few months before the Assembly polls there. The appointment at the time also served as a tool for political messaging to the backward classes in Bihar. Chauhan is a six-time MLA from the Ghosi Assembly seat in Mau and hails from the adjoining Azamgarh district. Considered one of the stronger OBC faces of the party in the Azamgarh-Mau region, Chauhan had also served as the chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Commission for Backward Classes. He was first elected from Ghosi in 1985 as part of the Dalit Majdoor Kisan Party of Chaudhary Charan Singh. In 1991, Chauhan won the seat as a Janta Party candidate. He then switched over to the BJP and won from Ghosi on a BJP ticket in 1996 and 2002 and became a minister in both the Ram Prakash Gupta as well as the Rajnath Singh-led BJP governments in the state. In 2006, he parted ways with the BJP and joined the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP). The following year, he won Ghosi as a BSP candidate and became the revenue minister in the Mayawati-led government. However, in 2012, he lost the election to the Samajwadi Party’s (SP) Sudhakar Singh. Two years later, Chauhan returned to the BJP and contested the 2017 Assembly elections from Ghosi and won again. He defeated Abbas Ansari, the son of gangster-turned-politician Mukhtar Ansari. Last year, Chauhan’s son Ram Vilas Chauhan was elected BJP MLA from Madhuban in the district of Mau.
