On Wednesday, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court asked Attorney General R Venkataramani to produce documents related to the appointment of Arun Goel as election commissioner on November 19.
The Supreme Court is currently hearing a clutch of petitions challenging the process by which election commissioners are appointed.
While the final ruling is yet to be delivered, oral arguments during the hearing have seen the court question if the process is excessively driven by the executive and whether making appointments through an independent panel instead would bring in more checks and balances.
What are the petitions about?
The court has a set of four public interest litigations before it, which were filed starting in 2015. The petitioners include Anoop Baranwal, an advocate before the Allahabad High Court, Ashwini Upadhyay, an advocate and Bharatiya Janata Party leader well-known for filing large numbers of public interest litigations and the Association for Democratic…