VISAKHAPATNAM: Bharatiya Janata Party State president and Visakhapatnam MP K Haribabu has sent a letter to Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh demanding the appointment of a separate Governor for Andhra Pradesh, apart from the establishment of the High Court in the State itself.
The MP wrote the letter to Rajnath Singh on January 11 and highlighted that post-bifurcation, the Andhra people strongly wanted that that the government must function from the State itself.He brought to the notice of the Centre that new State of Andhra Pradesh was formed in 2014 as per Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act and the government had been doing its best to set up the new capital city at Amaravati.
“The AP government started functioning from a temporary secretariat before all the offices were shifted to the new secretariat building at Velugapudi. But the High Court is still functioning from Hyderabad. There is a strong demand that the common High Court should be bifurcated and a separate one for the AP should be established in the State,” the letter quoted Haribabu as saying.
Further, the MP highlighted that the Governor of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana was now functioning from Hyderabad.“I want to bring it to the notice of the Centre that there is a strong desire in the minds of the AP people to have a Governor exclusively for the newly formed State, which will ensure smooth functioning of the administration and the Governor should perform his duties from the State capital, not from Hyderabad,” the MP told TNIE.
ESL Narasimhan assumed charge as the Governor of undivided Andhra Pradesh in January 2010 and his tenure was extended by five more years in 2012. Born in Tamil Nadu, the 1968-batch AP cadre IPS officer served in Intelligence Bureau and after his retirement in December 2006, he was made Governor of Chhattisgarh in January 2007. He took additional charge as the acting Governor of undivided AP on December 27, 2009, before he was appointed as the full-time Governor of the State in January 2010.
In his letter, the Vizag MP also requested the Centre to take the necessary steps to appoint a separate Governor for Andhra Pradesh at the earliest.
Since the last few weeks, there has been a pressure from the BJP quarters in Andhra Pradesh for the replacement of ESL Narasimhan as Governor. Visakhapatnam MLA and BJP Assembly floor leader P Vishnu Kumar Raju has been the most vocal of the lot. A few days ago, he alleged that Narasimhan as a Governor was showing step-motherly treatment to Andhra Pradesh and had hardly visited the State during the last three and a half years of his tenure.“It is high time the Centre took the decision to appoint a separate Governor and establish a High Court for Andhra Pradesh,” the MLA told TNIE on Tuesday.