The differences between the election commissioners over the ongoing SIR have brought to the fore various past cases where members of the poll authority had divergent views which came out in the open.
In 2009, then chief election commissioner (CEC) N Gopalaswami sought the removal of fellow commissioner late Navin Chawla over alleged partisan conduct.
The government rejected the recommendation, and Chawla went on to become CEC.
An even sharper clash preceded this one. Between 1993 and 1995, then CEC late T N Seshan went to court to challenge the creation of a multi-member Commission, leading to a legal battle with fellow commissioners M S Gill and G V G Krishnamurthy.
After his term as CEC ended, Gill joined the Congress and was made a Union minister.
During the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, then election commissioner Ashok Lavasa had given dissent notes on clean chits to top BJP leaders over alleged model code violations.
He had demanded that the dissent notes be included on record in the final published order. But noting that executive orders of the EC do not have a provision for attaching dissent notes in final decisions, his demand was turned down by the Commission then headed by Sunil Arora.
Lavasa later resigned from EC to join the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
In May 2021, then election commissioner Rajiv Kumar, who later became the CEC, attempted to file a separate affidavit with the Madras High Court and the Supreme Court, defending the poll body against a court observation.
The observations were made by the Madras High Court, which said that the Election Commission was “singularly responsible” for the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic due to its handling of assembly elections.
Then CEC Sushil Chandra was against the affidavit that Kumar wanted to file. Their differences came out in the open and made headlines.
The poll authority is yet again under fire after incumbent Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi red-flagged a variety of issues, including deletion of voters in the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voters’ list and raised objections to the decision-making process 14 times in the past few months.
Reacting to it, the Election Commission asserted that differing views and observations are a normal part of deliberation in any institution and all its orders “are an outcome of the unanimous decisions of the full Commission in the past one year”. (PTI)
The opposition parties, which have been critical of the EC over the SIR of electoral rolls, latched on to the issue to demand immediate impeachment proceedings against CEC Gyanesh Kumar in Parliament. (PTI)
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