New Delhi, Nov 23 (TIWN): The Supreme Court asked the Centre on Wednesday to produce before it the file related to the appointment of Election Commissioner Arun Goel, who was appointed on November 19.

A five-judge Constitution bench headed by Justice K M Joseph said it wants to know whether there was any "hanky panky" in Goel's appointment as election commissioner as he was only recently given voluntary retirement from service.

The bench rejected the objections of Attorney General (AG) R Venkataramani on the court willing to see the file related to Goel's appointment while the hearing is on.

Venkataramani told the bench, also comprising justices Ajay Rastogi, Aniruddha Bose, Hrishikesh Roy and C T Ravikumar, that it is dealing with the larger issue of appointment of ECs and the chief election commissioner (CEC) and it cannot look at an individual case flagged by advocate Prashant Bhushan.

"I take serious objection to this and have my reservation to the court seeing the file amidst the hearing of a Constitution bench," he said.

The bench said it started hearing a batch of pleas seeking a collegium-like system for the appointment of ECs and the CEC last Thursday and Goel was appointed as an EC subsequently on November 19. Therefore, it wants to see what prompted the step.

"We want to see what is the mechanism. We will not treat it as an adversarial and keep it for our record, but we want to know as you claim that everything is hunky dory. Since we were hearing the matter and appointment was made amidst, this may be interlinked. You have time till tomorrow. Produce the documents," it told the AG.