New Delhi, Feb. 18 -- Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Rajiv Kumar demits office today after overseeing 31 assembly elections and the Lok Sabha election 2024. Rajiv Kumar will be replaced by Gyanesh Kumar, the election commissioner since March last year.

Kumar served a four-and-a-half-year term at the election commission, of which about three years were spent as Chief Election Commissioner (CEC).

A retired 1984-batch IAS officer of the Bihar-Jharkhand cadre, Kumar joined the poll panel as Election Commissioner on September 1, 2020, replacing Ashok Lavasa, who had resigned. Lavasa reportedly had differed from the then CEC Sunil Arora during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections on issues such as the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) violations by high...