On Tuesday, the Supreme Court (SC) said it would take up the pleas against the appointment of the CEC and election commissioners under the 2023 law on February 19 as a "priority"

During his tenure as chief election commissioner (CEC), Gyanesh Kumar will oversee at least 22 Assembly polls, beginning with Bihar later this year, as well as the Presidential and Vice-Presidential elections in 2027. He will retire on January 26, 2029, nearly a month and a half ahead of the announcement of the next Lok Sabha polls.

The President appointed Kumar, a 1988 batch Kerala cadre Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, the country’s 26th CEC and Vivek Joshi, a 1989 batch Haryana cadre IAS officer, election commissioner on Monday evening amid controversy.

The appointments came hours after a meeting of the high-level committee chaired by the Prime Minister. At the meeting, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, urged the government to defer the appointment until the Supreme Court decides on petitions challenging the new selection process. Gandhi also submitted a dissent note to the panel, which includes Home Minister Amit Shah.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court (SC) said it would take up the pleas against the appointment of the CEC and election commissioners under the 2023 law on February 19 as a “priority”.

A Bench of Justices comprising Surya Kant and N Kotiswar Singh was informed by advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the Association for Democratic Reforms, that the government had excluded the Chief Justice of India (CJI) from the selection process — despite a 2023 Constitution Bench ruling mandating the inclusion of the CJI — thereby making a “mockery of democracy”.

Sharing a dissent note on X, Gandhi said it was “disrespectful” and “discourteous” for the PM and the Home Minister to have made a midnight decision to select the new CEC when the process of selection was being challenged in the SC. “By violating the SC order and removing the CJI from the committee, the Modi government has exacerbated the concerns of hundreds of millions of voters over the integrity of our electoral process,” Gandhi said.

In response, BJP leaders accused the Congress of conferring Padma awards on former CECs, fielding former CEC, T N Seshan, on a Congress ticket in 1996, and including M S Gill into the Rajya Sabha and making him a minister.  “Has Rahul Gandhi forgotten how ECs were appointed during Congress rule? Despite being in power for decades, why did Congress governments do nothing to reform the selection mechanism?” Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan asked in a post on X.

On February 12, the top court scheduled February 19 to hear pleas challenging the appointments under the 2023 law, saying that if anything happens in the interregnum, the consequences were bound to follow.

On March 15, 2024, the top court had refused to stay the appointments of the new EC under the new law, which Parliament enacted in late 2023, excluding the CJI from the selection panel. The apex court told the petitioners that its March 2, 2023, verdict had directed for the three-member panel comprising the PM, LoP, and the CJI to operate till Parliament enacted a law.

Kumar is the first CEC appointed under this new law. In 2024, Kumar and Sukhbir Sandhu were recommended as ECs by a selection panel chaired by the PM. According to the law, a CEC or EC retires at 65 or after serving a six-year term in the poll panel.