On Tuesday, August 5, 2025, Satyapal Malik, who has previously held the positions of Governor of Meghalaya, Goa, Odisha, and Bihar, died. He was seventy-nine.
Motivated by Ram Manohar Lohia’s socialist philosophy, Satyapal Malik started his political career in the middle of the 1960s. In 2004, he became a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and in 2012, he was named National Vice President. He was a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s core team prior to the 2014 general elections.
Satyapal Malik, who was from Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh and had family ties to Haryana, was a member of the politically powerful Jat community.
He temporarily belonged to the Congress Party and was the General Secretary of the Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee in the middle of the 1980s. He stepped down from the Congress Party in 1987 over the Bofors scandal, even though he had previously secured a seat in the Rajya Sabha. He was among the first members of Jan Morcha, which in 1988 became the Janata Dal.
Satyapal Malik was named the governor of Bihar in 2017. He was moved to Jammu and Kashmir in August 2018, where he served as governor on the same day in 2019 when Article 370 was historically repealed. He assumed office as the Governor of Goa in October 2019 but was quickly reassigned to Meghalaya just nine months later as part of a rapid administrative transition. On October 4, 2022, he stepped down as Meghalaya’s governor.