Manas Dasgupta

Ahmedabad, October 25

The first Lieutenant Governor of J&K, Girish Chandra Murmu, a 1985-batch IAS officer of the Gujarat cadre, had always been very close to Prime Minister Narendra Modi when he was the chief minister of his home state.

A tribal from Sundergarh district in Odisha, Murmu was the principal secretary to Modi for many years and moved with Modi to Delhi soon after he took over as the PM.

Once close to both Modi and present Home Minister Amit Shah when he was junior home minister to Modi in Gujarat, Murmu was credited with giving right political advice to both when they were facing wrath from various sections following the Gujarat riots and a series of encounters against “terrorists” that initially were called “fake encounters”.

His colleagues in the Gujarat secretariat describe him as the “legal backbone” of Modi, holding him in high esteem considering him as one of the principal contributors in the phenomenal rise of the once RSS “backroom boy” to the most powerful office of the PM and along with him Shah as the Home Minister. His appointment as Lieutenant Governor is being considered as a small return gift by Modi for all he had done to his political career.

Murmu, who holds a master’s degree from Utkal University, Bhubaneshwar, and MBA from the University of Birmingham, was always a part of a powerful group of bureaucrats in Gandhinagar. He was quizzed by the CBI in 2013 in connection with the alleged Ishrat Jahan fake encounter case, but came out unscathed.