It’s been a tough couple of days for Sanjay Kumar, co-director of Delhi-based think tank Lokniti-Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

On August 17, Kumar had tweeted out erroneous data, claiming significant changes in the voter list for four Maharashtra constituencies in the six months between the Lok Sabha elections in the middle of last year and the Assembly elections in November.

He apologised for the mistake, but it led to an avalanche of criticism and even abuse from Bharatiya Janata Party supporters. On Wednesday, the police in BJP-ruled Maharashtra filed an FIR against him.

The BJP is attempting to use Kumar’s mistake to rebut the Congress’s allegations that the ruling party has been guilty of “vote chori” or vote stealing, winning elections by manipulating voter lists.

In fact, the Congress’s “vote chori” campaign started with a press conference on August 7 by Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi presenting instances of faulty voter rolls in the Mahadevapura assembly constituency in Karnataka. No data on Maharashtra was used at all.

The BJP’s counter-campaign is using Kumar’s error about Maharashtra to deflect attention from discrepancies in the voter list in Karnataka that the Election Commission is yet to explain.

Kumar’s claims

On August 17, Sanjay Kumar tweeted some startling numbers.

He wrote that the Ramtek Assembly constituency in Maharashtra had 4.6 lakh voters during the 2024 Lok Sabha election. In the Assembly elections six months later, this decreased to 2.86 lakh – a staggering reduction of 38.5% of the electorate, he said.

Kumar shared similar data for another assembly constituency, Devlali, where the electorate had been cut down by 1.67 lakh voters in the same period – that is by 36.8% .

The trend in two other assemblies, Nashik West and Hingna, was completely opposite. The electorate there increased by more than 40%.

The Congress was quick to use Kumar’s figures as further proof for its “vote chori” campaign. Pawan Khera, the party’s media chief, tweeted out a graph using Kumar’s data, without checking for accuracy.

But Kumar’s numbers were erroneous. His team had compared the figures of different constituencies. For instance, in his Ramtek example, 4.6 lakh was actually the total number of voters in the nearby Kamthi assembly segment.

In fact, Ramtek’s electorate increased by only 10,474 voters between the two elections: a modest increase of 3.78%. Similarly, the electorate in Devlali increased by 4.04%, Nashik West by 6% and Hingna by 6.12%.

When several Twitter users pointed out the errors, Kumar apologised on Tuesday. He wrote that election figures had been “misread by our data team”, adding: “I had no intention of dispersing any form of misinformation.”

The fallout

Once Kumar had admitted his error, the BJP was swift to attack – not him, but Gandhi and the Congress, using the error to tar the “vote chori” campaign.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Fadnavis claimed that the Congress party’s allegations were based on data given by the CSDS, which had since “retracted all of their earlier data”.

BJP publicity cell head Amit Malviya asked: “Where does this leave Rahul Gandhi and the Congress, which brazenly targeted the Election Commission and went so far as to brand genuine voters as fake?”

Even the Election Commission joined in. On August 11, the chief electoral officer in Bihar – who has nothing to do with elections in Maharashtra – tweeted Kumar’s apology and said that his “data was quoted by many INC and opposition leaders for questioning EC”.

The Indian Council of Social Science Research, which oversees the CSDS and other research organisations, said it would issue it a show cause notice for “data manipulation” and undermining the sanctity of the Election Commission.

The Indian Council of Social Science Research functions under the Union Ministry of Education. Its notice even alleged that the CSDS published media stories based on a “biased interpretation” of the Election Commission’s special intensive revision of the voter rolls in Bihar – a likely reference to the recent Lokniti-CSDS survey on the exercise.

Rahul Gandhi’s allegations

In his August 7 press conference in Delhi, Rahul Gandhi said that his team had spent six months examining the voter rolls in Karnataka’s Mahadevapura assembly constituency and found found discrepancies in 100,250 names.

These dubious voters, he alleged, had helped the BJP win the larger Bangalore central parliamentary seat during last year’s Lok Sabha polls.

Gandhi’s presentation used actual voter lists published by the Election Commission to make its claims. This data is publicly available and not from the CSDS, as Fadnavis claimed.

The Election Commission is yet to refute Gandhi’s allegations. Instead, it has repeatedly asked him to submit an affidavit swearing by his claims of voter list manipulation or apologise.

Gandhi has previously claimed that the 40 lakh voters who were added in Maharashtra between the Lok Sabha polls and the state assembly polls last year were instrumental in undermining his party’s electoral fortunes. The Congress went from being the single-largest party winning 13 out of 48 seats in the Lok Sabha to bagging just 16 out of 288 seats in the Vidhan Sabha.

Again, this is official Election Commission data, and not from the CSDS. The statistical reports for the Lok Sabha polls and the assembly polls in Maharashtra available on the Election Commission’s show that the state enrolled 40.8 lakh voters between the two polls.

The CSDS does not publish any election data. Its flagship study is actually a Lokniti-CSDS survey called “National Election Studies”, which gauges public opinion on crucial issues before and after every Lok Sabha poll.

None of these surveys have been retracted.

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