Hyderabad: SS Sandhu and Gyanesh Kumar were Thursday appointed as Election Commissioners by the Narendra Modi government. Both the officers are former bureaucrats.
Sukhbir Singh Sandhu is a retired officer IAS officer. He was the 17th Chief Secretary of Uttarakhand. He was the Chief Secretary of Uttarakhand after the BJP came to power and Pushkar Chief Minister in 2021.
Sandhu also was the chairman of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). He has also worked as an additional secretary in the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resources Development.
Sandhu completed his MBBS from Government Medical College, Amritsar and has also done a Master's Degree in History from the Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar. The retired bureaucrat also worked as Commissioner, of Ludhiana Municipal Corporation.
Gyanesh Kumar is also a retired IAS officer. He played a key role in setting up the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teertha Kshetra Trust when he was in the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA). He headed the Jammu and Kashmir desk at the MHA in 2019 when Article 370 was abrogated in Jammu and Kashmir. He retired as Secretary, of the Ministry of Cooperation, a portfolio held by senior BJP leader Amit Shah.
The duo were named as Election Commissioners by a panel headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which also included Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury.
Days before the expected announcement of the schedule for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Election Commissioner Arun Goel on February 9 resigned from his post, which was later seen with high suspicion by the opposition and civil society. His tenure was till December 5, 2027, and he would have become Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) after incumbent Rajiv Kumar retired in February next year.
