Andhra Pradesh

Jagan exhibits care in appointment of new SEC

Andhra Pradesh Election Commissioner N Ramesh Kumar is out. The new State Election Commissioner (SEC) is V Kanagaraj, former Judge of the Madras High Court. 

In terms of a controversial dismissal, this is right up there. Because the SEC has been changed even while the state is technically in the midst of the local body elections. The process for the polls had begun in March 2020 but Ramesh Kumar postponed them by six weeks, citing the Corona virus pandemic. 

Miffed with Ramesh Kumar’s decision, Jaganmohan Reddy personally accused him of a caste bias while YSRCP leaders charged him with playing to Chandrababu Naidu’s tunes. But the government’s appeal in the Supreme Court did not pass muster and rightly so, given the virus outbreak through out the country, including Andhra Pradesh.

Kanagaraj took charge on Saturday, preventing any move by Ramesh Kumar to stall his appointment or challenge the ordinance issued by the Governor on Friday.

Jagan has taken care of two things in this appointment. Contrary to speculation in the local media, he did not appoint any retired judge from the Reddy community because that would have given his detractors a tool to target him, accusing him of the same caste bias. By bringing in a person who has served as a Judge in another state, Jagan also has sent the message that the new SEC will be impartial.  

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.