Senior Odisha BJP leader Biswabhusan Harichandan was appointed as Governor of Andhra Pradesh by President Ram Nath Kovind on Tuesday.
Harichandan, in his reaction, thanked Prime Minister Modi and Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan for his appointment as Governor of a “big State”. He would try to improve the relations between Andhra Pradesh and Odisha, he added.
A former State Minister, 84-year-old Harichandan had refrained from contesting elections since his defeat as the BJP candidate in the Bhubaneswar Central Assembly constituency in the 2009 polls.
Before the 2019 elections, it was expected that Harichandan would be sent to the Rajya Sabha from Odisha, but such a hope could not materialise as the BJP failed to get a requisite number of Assembly seats. Moreover, the BJP high command preferred to nominate former IAS officer Ashwini Vaishnaw to the Parliament’s Upper House with the support of the BJD.
Now, Harichandan’s decades-old political career, which had begun as a leader of the then Bharatiya Jana Sangha in 1971, has ended while his son Prithviraj Harichandan, who is a BJP State general secretary, will continue to be active in politics despite his defeats in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls from Bhubaneswar and the 2019 Assembly elections from the Chilika seat.