S.Y. Quraishi

S.Y. Quraishi joined the Indian Administrative Service in 1971 and rose to become the seventeenth chief election commissioner of India. He introduced a number of electoral reforms, such as the creation of a voter education division, expenditure monitoring division, the India International Institute of Democracy and Election Management, and launched the National Voters Day. In October 2017, he was appointed ambassador of democracy by International IDEA (Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance), Stockholm, of which he is a board member. He is the author of An Undocumented Wonder: The Making of the Great Indian Election (2014), The Population Myth: Islam, Family Planning and Politics in India (2021), and has edited The Great March of Democracy: Seven Decades of India's Elections (2019).