Election Commissioner Ashok Lavasa, who was next in line to become Chief Election Commissioner and was recently appointed vice president of the Asian Development Bank, today resigned from the poll panel.
Lavasa is expected to join the Phillipines-based ADB next month. He has submitted his resignation to President Ram Nath Kovind and has requested to be relieved by August 31.
Having joined as Election Commissioner on January 23, 2018, as per convention, Lavasa was next in line to become the CEC after Sunil Arora's retirement from the post in April 2021. Lavasa was scheduled to retire in October 2022, and as CEC, he would have been in charge of conducting a slew of Assembly elections—in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Goa. His resignation places Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra next in line to take over as the CEC.
Lavasa is only the second Election Commissioner to resign before completing his term. In 1973, Chief Election Commissioner Nagender Singh had resigned prematurely to be appointed as judge in the International Court of Justice.
The ADB had announced Lavasa's appointment as vice president on July 15. He will take over from Diwakar Gupta, who completes his term as vice president on August 31. Lavasa's appointment is learnt to have been made with the concurrence of the Union government.
An IAS officer of the Haryana cadre, Lavasa had served in various bureaucratic positions, including as Union environment secretary and civil aviation secretary. He retired as Union finance secretary in October 2017.
Lavasa has had an eventful stint at the Election Commission, making news for dissenting with Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora and Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra over the clean chit given by the poll body to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the then BJP chief Amit Shah over complaints of violating the Model Code of Conduct during the 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign. His dissent was not recorded in the minutes of the meeting of the Commission, leading to a controversy.
He continued to be in the news when his close family members, including his wife and son, were probed by the Income Tax department for alleged non-disclosure of income.
