From overseeing Article 370 abrogation to heading MHA desk on Ayodhya, meet Gyanesh Kumar, the new Election Commissioner

The Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led high-level committee on March 14 picked former bureaucrats Gyanesh Kumar and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu as the , the leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury informed. 

Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury is one of the members of the PM-led panel. The vacancies were created after the retirement of Anup Chandra Pandey in February and the surprise resignation of recently. 

One of the new Election Commissioners, Gyanesh Kumar is a 1988-batch IAS officer from the Kerala cadre. Kumar, 60, has worked with Union Home Minister Amit Shah before. He retired as secretary in the Ministry of Cooperation, which comes under Amit Shah, on January 31, 2024. Before that, he also served as the secretary in the Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs.

Kumar was posted as Joint Secretary Kashmir Division in Amit Shah-led Home Ministry when was abrogated in August 2019. 

In 2020, Kumar, posted as additional secretary, headed a in the Home Ministry to look after all matters related to the Supreme Court verdict on the, including the formation of the trust. 

The Supreme Court on November 9 had ordered the that would eventually pave the way for the construction of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. At that time, Kumar headed the Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh (JKL) affairs in the Home Ministry. The Ayodhya cell under the Home Ministry was created in 1990.

Born on January 27, 1964, in Uttar Pradesh, Kumar is an engineering graduate from the Kanpur where he did a BTech in Civil Engineering. He has also done a PG in Economics from Harvard, USA besides studying CFA at the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India (ICFAI).

Kumar’s father was a doctor and his grandfather was a freedom fighter and later a principal in Agra,