Election commissioner Arun Goel has resigned, leaving the Election Commission of India solely in the hands of chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar before the Lok Sabha polls.

A gazette notification on Saturday night said that Goel’s resignation had been accepted by the President.

The commission is mandated to have three members, but with the government yet to fill the vacancy left by election commissioner Anup Chandra Pandey’s retirement in February, it’s now left with a single member in Kumar.

Goel did not respond to calls and a message from this newspaper. His reasons for resigning have not been revealed. He was absent from a news conference the poll panel had held during a visit to Calcutta on Tuesday. This, a commission official said, was due to ill health.

Under a new law, election commissioners will no longer be appointed merely on a recommendation from the cabinet, as in the past.

A two-step process, involving a search committee and then a selection committee, will make the choice.

Although the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha is part of the selection committee, the Centre still retains the upper hand since the Prime Minister and one of his cabinet colleagues are the other two members. The Narendra Modi government has not yet revealed whether the search committee — headed by the Union law minister — has recommended any names.

Former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi told The Telegraph: “This (Goel’s resignation) is a great surprise and a matter of concern as the elections are due within a couple of weeks.”

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge tweeted: “India now has only ONE Election Commissioner, even as Lok Sabha elections are to be announced in few days. Why?”

He added:”...If we do NOT stop the systematic decimation of our independent institutions, our DEMOCRACY shall be usurped by DICTATORSHIP! ECI will now be among the last Constitutional institutions to fall.”

Since the commission became a three-member body in the early 1990s, only two Lok Sabha polls — those of 1999 and 2009 — were conducted by two-member panels because of commissioners retiring after the announcement of the polls. All the other general elections were conducted by a full strength commission.

Goel was Union heavy industries secretary when he took voluntary retirement to join the EC in 2022. His appointment came under a cloud after poll watchdog Association for Democratic Reforms moved the Supreme Court against it. The plea was, however, dismissed.

Goel is the second election commissioner in the past five years to quit office. Ashok Lavasa resigned in 2020 to join the Asian Development Bank — an appointment recommended by the Centre — a year after he had opposed a poll panel decision to let off Modi for poll code violations in his speeches during the previous Lok Sabha campaign.