The controversy surrounding the Election Commission of India (ECI) has moved well beyond a dispute over electoral-roll revision. On 23 September 2026, an upright journalist (a very rare species these days!) called Ritika Chopra of the Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had recorded objections on at least 14 occasions over the preceding 10 months concerning voter registration, deletion and restoration of names, access to electoral data and aspects of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The report raised serious questions about transparency, institutional procedure, democratic functioning, and the protection of eligible voters, lakhs of whom have been wrongly disenfranchised in several states through the SIR process.

The five Left parties, and almost the entire opposition, have demanded the immediate removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, a complete halt to SIR, restoration of voting rights to the lakhs who have been wrongly excluded, restoration of the ECI’s independent functioning, and replacement of the present mechanism for appointing Election Commissioners with a selection committee comprising the Prime Minister, Leader of the Opposition and Chief Justice of India.

The wider question is accountability. Allegations and political criticism have squarely targeted the BJP-RSS Union government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. It is crystal clear that the credibility of ECI has been destroyed by the latest revelations.

The current BJP regime is already notorious for its arbitrary and immoral misuse of central agencies like the CBI, ED, IT, etc to threaten, browbeat, or purchase opposition leaders, MPs and MLAs, and break political parties. All this is fully enabled by corporate money power. The ‘Godi’ media is also complicit in these conspiracies. There have been serious allegations, not without reason, that the ECI and sections of the higher judiciary have also been compromised.         

The same question of accountability arises in the banking system. In the recent insolvency proceedings involving Essel/Zee Group Chairman Subhash Chandra, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) approved a resolution under which ₹6.5 crore would be paid by Subhash Chandra against admitted claims of about ₹22,006.57 crore—a reduction of 99.97 per cent!

Similarly, by the Union government’s own admission in Parliament, from FY 2014-15 to FY 2024-25, Scheduled Commercial Banks wrote off about ₹17.95 lakh crore of Non-Performing Assets (NPAs). Out of this, about ₹9.75 lakh crore was in the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) ‘Large Industries and Services’ category, which means large/corporate borrowers. It is obvious that all this could never have happened without the Union government’s clear sanction.   

The contrast with the Union government’s attitude to the peasantry could not be starker. Not a single rupee loan taken by farmers or agricultural workers from Scheduled Commercial Banks has been similarly written off in the last 12 years! And this is in spite of the fact that distress suicides of debt-ridden farmers and agricultural workers during the Modi regime have crossed the one lakh mark, as per the National Crime Bureau Bureau’s (NCRB) own records! The NCRB, by the way, is directly under the Union Home Ministry, now headed by Amit Shah! 

Meanwhile, farmers continue to face massive crop loss due to natural calamities like drought, floods, and unseasonal rains; a pro-corporate crop insurance scheme (PMFBY); spiralling input costs; lack of legal guarantee of a remunerative Minimum Support Price (MSP) and procurement; the abrogation of the rural employment lifeline MGNREGA, and so on.

This is the venal regime that we have been living under for the last dozen years. There is only one way to combat it – extensive and intensive mass struggle, like the farmers’ struggle of 2020-21 and the students’ struggle of 2026. And there is only one slogan which must now be given in this struggle – Throw the Rascals Out!