In SC, Centre defends appointment of new ECs
Union government refutes allegations that it had rushed to fill vacancies with ‘favoured’ persons Says the appointment was a ‘necessity’ arising from constitutional duty to conduct poll on time Says the plea challenging exclusion of CJI from EC selection
The appointment of Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Gyanesh Kumar, criticised as hasty and opaque, was a necessity arising from a constitutional duty to conduct the elections on time, the Centre told the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The Centre was rebuffing allegations that it had taken advantage of the two vacancies in the Election Commission to fill the posts with appointees favourable to the present regime. The case will come up for hearing on Friday.
A petition by the Association for Democratic Reforms had argued that the new law, the Chief Election Commissioner and Election Commissioners Act, 2023, aided the government by giving it a dominant role in the appointment process.
The statute had countermanded a previous SC judgment, by replacing the Chief Justice of India with a Cabinet Minister as a member of the Selection Committee. The Centre said this argument suffered from a “fundamental fallacy” that the presence of a judge would guarantee the independence of the EC.
“The independence of the Election Commission, or any other organisation or authority, does not arise from and is not attributable to the presence of a judicial member in the selection committee. Likewise, the presence of senior government functionaries on the selection committee cannot in and of itself be a ground to automatically assume bias on behalf of the committee,” the government argued.
Stop-gap arrangement
The government said that the inclusion of the Chief Justice as a member of the selection panel was just a stopgap arrangement, meant to last only till Parliament made a law on EC appointments.
It said that the accusations made against the recent appointments to the
EC were plain “malicious”, pointing out that the two vacancies had to be filled in order to announce the schedule for the Lok Sabha election within time. The Commissioners were appointed on March 14, and took charge on March 15; the election schedule was then announced on March 16. The Centre said that it would not have been “humanly possible” for Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar to solely steer the “world’s biggest electoral exercise”, with voting scheduled to begin on April 19.
‘To stir controversy’
Noting that there were no allegations against Mr. Sandhu or Mr. Kumar, the government claimed that attempts were on to stir a political controversy based on pernicious statements about certain vague and unspecified motives behind the appointments.
The sharplyworded affidavit also countered statements made by Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, leader of the single largest party in the Opposition, and a member of the highlevel selection committee. The Congress leader had claimed that he was kept in the dark about the details of candidates under consideration for the two EC positions. The Centre said that the profiles of the eligible persons were shared with him on March 13, and explained that the deliberations of the committee were of a collaborative nature, with discussions taking place during the actual meeting itself.
The government said that the 2023 law had introduced a far more democratic, collaborative and inclusive appointment process than what had existed for the previous 73 years. “From 1950 to 2023, the appointment of Election Commissioners was wholly an Executive action,” it reminded the court.