Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee remembered Satya Pal Malik, who died on Tuesday, as someone “who became famous in Indian politics by uttering some truths, which few dare to do".

Malik, the last governor of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, passed away on Tuesday afternoon at a Delhi hospital after prolonged illness. He was 79.

Mamata was not the only one to laud Malik for his outspokenness. Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi and Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin, too, heaped praise on Malik for sticking with the “truth” till his last.

Malik’s stay in Srinagar while he was the governor – the first since militancy broke out in the state – became a point of friction between him and his former political bosses, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah.

The "truths" that the Opposition leaders praised Malik for came after he was moved out of the Raj Bhawan in Srinagar to those in Meghalaya and Goa.

He claimed there was corruption in a hydel project in Kashmir and accused the Centre’s of failing to fix accountability for the Pulwama attack that took the lives of 40 CRPF jawans.

The hydel project that Malik had flagged came to bite him.

The CBI filed a chargesheet against him and five others this May in the Rs 2,200-crore Kiru hydropower project scam.

Soon after, he was admitted to the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital and remained there till his last.

In October 2023, in a chat with Rahul, Malik had squarely laid the blame on the Modi government for the Pulwama attack. He had also claimed Modi himself wanted him to keep mum.

“The day it happened he was shooting at the Corbett National Park. I tried to contact him three or four times but he wasn’t available. He called me around 5 or 6 pm and asked Satya Pal bhai what had happened? I told him these many of our people have died and they have died because of our mistakes,” Malik told Rahul Gandhi.

“He told me to keep silent and not say a word more. Doval [Ajit Doval. the national security advisor], my classmate, called me an hour later. I had already spoken with two channels. He also told me not to speak on it. I thought they would conduct a probe and what I say could impact it,” Malik said.

Malik had blamed the Modi government on intelligence failure and refusal to accept the CRPF’s demand for aircraft for troop movement.

“They had asked for five aircraft. Had they asked from me I would have arranged for these. After four months the application was rejected. Had I known about it I would have done something. That was between CRPF and home ministry. The possibility of an attack was there. For 10 days the explosive-laden vehicle was moving around. There are eight to 10 link roads. None of them were sanitised on that fateful day,” Malik had claimed.

Months before his chat with Rahul, Malik had said the same to journalist Karan Thapar in an interview with the news portal The Wire in April of the same year.

In the interview to Thapar, he had said: “Narendra Modi has no dislike for corruption and had taken no action against those alleged to be involved in corruption because they were close to him.”

In January 2022, Malik claimed to have got into a fight when he – a native of Baghpat in Uttar Pradesh, a Jat stronghold – went to intervene on behalf of agitating farmers.

“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?’,” Malik was heard saying in a video that went viral. “I told him yes, since you are the king. Anyway, I ended up having a fight with him. He told me to meet Amit Shah and so I did.”

The video was recorded in Haryana’s Charkhi Dadri where he went to attend a social event.