Satya Pal Malik named in CBI case he flagged: Who is the former governor who took on Centre?

“So far Satya Pal Malik was examined as a witness in the cases,” a CBI official said.

The 78-year-old veteran, who started his political career as a student union leader in Meerut in 1968-69, has been with an array of political parties through his long political career. He entered electoral politics in 1974, winning the Assembly seat from his native place Baghpat, on a ticket from Chaudhary Charan Singh’s Bharatiya Kranti Dal. He later followed Charan Singh into the Bharatiya Lok Dal, becoming its general secretary. In 1980, Malik entered the Rajya Sabha on a Lok Dal ticket. But in 1984, he joined the Congress, which sent him to the Rajya Sabha in 1986.

In the wake of the Bofors scam, he resigned from the Congress in 1987 and joined V P Singh. In 1989, he won the Lok Sabha election from Aligarh as a Janata Dal candidate, and in 1990, served a short term as the Union minister of state for parliamentary affairs and tourism.

In 2004, Malik joined the BJP and unsuccessfully contested the Lok Sabha elections, losing to then RLD chief Ajit Singh from Baghpat. During its first term, the Modi government appointed Malik head of a parliamentary team that looked into the Land Acquisition Bill. His panel opined against the Bill, and the government relegated it to the cold storage.

After he had held several senior posts in the BJP, the Narendra Modi government appointed Malik as the Bihar Governor in October 2017, before he was transferred to J&K in August 2018. Malik was the first politician appointed to the post since the beginning of militancy in Kashmir. It was during his J&K tenure that the Modi government scrapped Article 370.

However, it was after he was moved to Goa in November 2019, and then to Meghalaya — both of which are smaller states — that Malik is said to have been “upset” and began nursing thoughts of resurrecting himself as a Jat leader. But political colleagues say Malik had always been outspoken, even as an active politician.

It was as Meghalaya Governor that Malik made the claims of corruption in Kashmir hydel project and followed it up with claims of the Centre failing to fix accountability in Pulwama attack.

As Bihar Governor, a post he took over in 2017, Malik accused all politicians in the state of owning BEd colleges. Bihar was then ruled by the BJP-JD(U) combine.

Malik was the Governor of J&K when, in November 2018, while dissolving the Assembly, Malik said that had he looked to Delhi, he would have had to install a government led by Sajad Lone, and history would have remembered him as a “dishonest man”.

Addressing a gathering at a Gwalior university, he added: “So I ended the matter once and for all. Those who abuse me will continue to do so, but I am convinced I did the right thing.”

On January 7, 2019, months before he oversaw the scrapping of J&K’s special status as its Governor, Malik claimed all was well in the state. “The number of murders witnessed in Patna in a single day is equal to deaths in Kashmir in a week.”

In July 2019, addressing an event in Jammu, Malik called on militants to kill the corrupt. “The boys with guns are unnecessarily killing unarmed people… Why are you killing them? Kill those who have looted the wealth of your country and your Kashmir,” he said.

Two months after J&K became a Union Territory on August 5, 2019, Malik was appointed Governor of Goa. Then, in March 2020, at a public meeting in Baghpat, western UP, he said Governors of Kashmir largely just drank and played golf. “The Governor has no work,” he said.

Later the same month, speaking in Goa, he said that a day before Article 370 was abrogated, he had got a call from the then chief secretary, saying that more than 1,000 people could get killed if J&K’s special status was scrapped.

By July 2020, he had begun speaking against Goa’s BJP government led by Pramod Sawant over its handling of the Covid pandemic. Next month, he was transferred to Meghalaya as Governor. In an interview with India Today TV in October 2021, Malik alleged that the Sawant government had kept him in the dark on the outbreak, and that he had to rely on Raj Bhavan employees returning from containment zones for news about the pandemic.

He also alleged large scale corruption by the Sawant government, and said he was shunted out as Governor for calling this out. “I am a Lohiaite, I’ve spent time with Charan Singh, I can’t tolerate corruption,” he said, adding that he had informed PM Modi about an alleged scam involving door-to-door distribution of rations.

While he was the Meghalaya Governor, amid reports of militants targeting civilians in Kashmir, Malik said such incidents had never taken place in his time, and accused an RSS functionary of corruption in J&K.

“Two files came before me in J&K. One of them pertained to Ambani, another to a senior RSS functionary. One of the secretaries told me these are fraud files, but he also said you can get Rs 150 crore each in the two deals. I rejected the offer, saying, ‘I have come with five kurtas and will go with them’,” Malik said.

After the speech created a huge controversy, J&K L-G Manoj Sinha ordered a CBI inquiry into it. The CBI had subsequently registered two FIRs, and has conducted multiple searches and questioned several people, including Malik, in the matter.

By February 2021, Malik was openly criticising the Centre. In an interview to The Indian Express that month, he spoke out against the Centre’s handling of protests against the farm laws that had been on since November 2020. “The farmers can’t be sent back insulted. You can’t humiliate them and send them back from the protests. You should engage them in a conversation,” Malik said.

A month later, Malik raised the issue in public at a gathering in Baghpat, suggesting that there could be a backlash by the Sikhs like that over Operation Blue Star.

In November 2021, addressing a ‘Global Jat Summit’ in Jaipur, Malik said, “The country has never seen such a huge protest where 600 people have been martyred. Even if an animal dies, a condolence message is issued by Delhi leaders. But no prastav (motion) is passed over [the deaths of] 600 farmers.”

In January 2022, Malik attacked the PM in a speech at Dadri in western UP over the farmers’ protests. “When I went to meet the PM to discuss the issue, I ended up fighting with him within five minutes. He was very arrogant. When I told him that 500 of our own (farmers) had died… he said, ‘Did they die for me?’,” he was heard saying in a video clip from the function.

In October 2022, his tenure as Meghalaya Governor over, Malik addressed a gathering in Bulandshahr in UP, where he criticised the Agnipath scheme. According to an IANS report, he said the government was playing with the lives of the youth.

Soon after, speaking to reporters at his village Hisawada in Baghpat, he said he had no intention of joining active politics, but wished to be a “mentor” to the RLD and SP, and to fight for the welfare of farmers “who had been at the receiving end of the anti-farmer policies of the Modi government”.