Sushil Chandra appointed Chief Election Commissioner

Sushil Chandra will take over as the new Chief Election Commissioner on Tuesday succeeding Sunil Arora, who completed his term at the Nirvachan Sadan on Monday.

The Election Commission is set to witness the change of guard even as it is in the middle of conducting the assembly polls in the four states – Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Assam, and West Bengal – as well as the Union Territory of Puducherry.

Chandra has been an Election Commissioner since February 2019. President Ram Nath Kovind appointed him as the next Chief Election Commissioner, the Ministry of Law and Justice stated in a press release issued on Monday.

Arora was appointed as an Election Commissioner in September 2017, after his retirement from the Indian Administrative Service, which he had joined in 1980. He was appointed as the Chief Election Commissioner in December 2018.

His term at the helm of the commission came to its end on Monday.

Chandra, an Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer of 1980 batch, was appointed as the Election Commissioner on February 15, 2019, after his superannuation as the chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT). He was “at the forefront” of the Modi Government’s “fight against black money” and “spearheaded” action against “tax evasion in the wake of November 2016 demonetization”, according to his profile on the official website of the EC. He held “sensitive posts in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Delhi” during his 38-year-long stint in the Indian Revenue Service.

He will now lead the EC in concluding the assembly elections in Kerala, West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, and Puducherry.

Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur, and Goa will also witness polls in February-March in 2022 with Chandra as the Chief Election Commissioner.

With Arora demitting office on Monday, the EC at present consists of Chandra and Rajiv Kumar, who was appointed as the Election Commissioner in August 2020 after his retirement as the Finance Secretary of the Union Government.

The government will now have to appoint a second Election Commission to fill in the vacancy in the three-member panel.

Ashok Lavasa was senior to Chandra and was next in line to take over as the Chief Election Commissioner after Arora. He, however, resigned in August 2020 to join the Asian Development Bank as a vice-president.

Lavasa had a run-in with Arora and Chandra over enforcing Model Code Conduct during Lok Sabha polls 2019. His disagreement with other two members of the EC on the issue of enforcement of the poll code during the parliamentary polls last year had come to public domain. He had written a letter to the Chief Election Commissioner protesting against his dissenting minority views not being recorded in the decisions taken by the EC on notices or orders issued by it in the cases related to alleged flouting of the poll code, particularly on giving clean chits to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the then president of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Amit Shah, who later took over as Union Home Minister.

The BJP-led Government later launched a probe against Lavasa, asking 11 public sector undertakings to verify if he had exercised “undue influence” during his tenure at the Ministry of Power from 2009 to 2013. The Income Tax department had also sent notices to his wife, sister and son. He, however, chose to resign and join the ADB as the Vice President.