The Maharashtra Police on Wednesday filed a case against Sanjay Kumar, a psephologist with the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, for an erroneous claim that he had made in a social media post and subsequently retracted about voter numbers in the state.

The first information report has been filed under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to making false statements about an election, statements conducing to public mischief, furnishing false information to public servants and creating a false electronic record, ANI reported.

Kumar is a professor and co-director of Lokniti, a research programme at the Centre for the Study for Developing Societies.

He had claimed on Sunday that two Assembly constituencies in Maharashtra – Ramtek and Deolali – had witnessed a significant drop in the number of voters between the 2024 Lok Sabha election and the Assembly election held later that year.

In a social media post, which was later removed, Kumar claimed that there had been a 38.4% drop in Ramtek and a 36.8% drop in Deolali. The post included specific figures, citing a decrease of around 1.7 lakh voters in each constituency.

On Tuesday, Kumar deleted the post, attributing the error to a data misreading by his team. He apologised, saying that he had “no intention of dispersing any form of misinformation”.

In Ramtek, Congress candidate Shyamkumar Barve won the Lok Sabha seat with more than 48% of the votes. Six months later, the Shiv Sena’s Ashish Jaiswal won the Ramtek Assembly segment with more than 52%.

In Deolali, a segment of the Nashik Lok Sabha constituency, the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) won in the general election but finished third in the Assembly polls.

But in two other assemblies, Nashik West and Hingna, the electorate increased by more than 40%.

The controversy escalated into a political row amid allegations by Opposition parties about electoral fraud in the country. The Bharatiya Janata Party accused Congress leaders of using Kumar’s erroneous data to spread misinformation about the electoral process.

On Tuesday, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the apex central government body that funds and promotes research in the social and human sciences, said that it would issue a notice to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in connection with the claim.

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