“Tearing urgency, lightning speed”, Supreme Court questions Centre on appointment of Election Commissioner

After the Center presented the original file of Election Commissioner Arun Goel’s appointment before the Constitution bench on Thursday, the Supreme Court questioned the lightning-quickness with which his name was finalised.

This occurred the day after the Supreme Court stated that the Centre should not be afraid to produce the file “if they were right, as they claimed and that there was no hanky panky” in regards to the “process” by which the former IAS official was selected as the Election Commissioner last week.

On Thursday, a five-judge Constitution Bench, presided over by Justice K M Joseph and made up of Justices Ajay Rastogi, Aniruddha Bose, Hrishikesh Roy, and C T Ravikumar, said that the file was cleared within 24 hours and questioned the Centre as to whether there was any “tearing urgency” to do so. The petitions sought changes to the appointment of Election Commissioners.

The Center, through Attorney General R. Venkataramani, asked the court to “hold its mouth” and asked it to look into the matter completely as the top court noted that the file pertaining to Goel’s appointment was cleared with “lightning speed.”

Which type of evaluation is this? However, the panel stated that they were only criticising the procedure and not Arun Goel’s qualifications.

When asked how the Law Minister selected the four names to be recommended to the Prime Minister, the Attorney General said it was done using a database that DoPT maintains.

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