The selection committee headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointed Gyanesh Kumar as the new Chief Election Commissioner of India. The development was announced by the Union Law Ministry. Gyanesh Kumar will be replacing incumbent CEC Rajiv Kumar who will be retiring from his services on February 18. As Gyanesh Kumar is now CEC, the Government of India has appointed IAS Vivek Joshi as the Election Commissioner.
The announcement came hours after the selection committee held a meeting to finalise the name of the Chief Election Commission of India. Besides Prime Minister Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi were part of the three-member panel to select the CEC. The committee met at the Prime Minister's Office in South Block and recommended the name to President Droupadi Murmu.
Who is Gyanesh Kumar?
Gyanesh Kumar was appointed as an Election Commissioner in March last year. Under his leadership, he will oversee key elections, including the Bihar Assembly polls later this year and the West Bengal, Assam, and Tamil Nadu elections in 2026. A 1988-batch IAS officer from the Kerala cadre, Gyanesh Kumar is currently the senior-most among the two Election Commissioners in the three-member panel that was led by Rajiv Kumar. The other Election Commissioner on the panel is Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, an officer from the Uttarakhand cadre.
Rajiv Kumar's tenure
Rajiv Kumar took charge as the Chief Election Commissioner in 2022, during which he successfully conducted the 2024 Lok Sabha elections along with several state assembly elections. These included polls in Jammu & Kashmir, Maharashtra, Haryana, Karnataka, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and more recently, the Delhi Assembly elections.
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