Former bureaucrats Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Gyanesh Kumar have been named as the new election commissioners by a panel chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. One of the committee members, Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, raised questions over the procedure and gave his dissent note on the selection. The appointments have not been made official yet.
They are 1988-batch officers of the Indian Administrative Service and belonged to the Kerala and Uttarakhand cadres, respectively. The appointments were made despite Congress leader Chowdhury’s objection to the procedure. The vacancies in the Election Commission had come up after the retirement of Anup Chandra Pandey and the sudden resignation of Arun Goel ahead of the Lok Sabha elections.