When data is deployed to exaggerate, to deceive

Telling It Straight

Sherlock Holmes warned against theorising before one has data: “Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” But when the intention is to twist facts to shape a narrative, data is the first casualty.

In the nearly 10 years of the Modi government, there have been questions about its handling of data. Evidently, there are areas where it has buried or blacked out the data that was inconvenient to its agenda of running a glorious Hindutva regime; if not, the government and its supporters have disputed the quality of that data, or the conclusions drawn from it. It has also faced allegations of fudging the data, most recently in the case of India’s GDP for the first quarter this financial year.

If the first is to bury bad news, the latter is to project the image of good news. But there is another novel way in which the Modi government tries to institute its achievement of having done better than its predecessors. This is a clever tactic which is often overlooked not only by the average voter but also by experts who are taken in by the dominant media narrative of trumpeting a particular achievement. Here are three examples of this technique.

The first is the Chandrayaan-3 landing, which was claimed by PM Modi to be the first to have landed near the moon’s south pole. The rover landed at a latitude of around 69 degrees south on the moon, which falls within the moon’s southern hemisphere but not in the polar region. On the moon, there are varying definitions for the polar region. The Chinese consider it to be “between the latitudes of 88.5 and 90 degrees,” while NASA refers to the “entire” polar region as being from 80 to 90 degrees south.

On earth, its polar region is defined to be between 66.5 and 90 degrees south because the earth’s rotational axis is tilted at around 23.5 degrees relative to the sun. Since the moon’s tilt is only 1.5 degrees, the polar region is much smaller there.

According to the European Space Agency, too, the Chandrayaan-3 landing site is “strictly speaking, not the south pole”, as landing in the south pole proper is “incredibly difficult”.

A scientific paper published by Indian scientists in the peer-reviewed journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in August detailed their preparation work to determine a landing site, which they described as “a high-latitude location on the moon”. In another study published in September in the solar system journal Icarus, they said the landing site was in “the southern high-latitude region”. They were being accurate but later on played along with the political motive of claiming it as having landed on the lunar south pole.

This is not to belittle what ISRO achieved, but to say that it needed no exaggerated or inflated claims. After all, the Chandrayaan-3 landed at a higher latitude than achieved by any previous moon mission. In 2019, China’s Chang’e 4 craft landed only at a latitude of 45.44 degrees south.

The second is the pace of road construction. Till 2018, road construction was measured by the traditional linear length method, which counted the overall length of road irrespective of the lanes on the road. The Modi government then shifted to lane-kilometre method of measuring roads that involves measuring the length of each new lane that is built, instead of counting the overall length of the road. Before 2018, 1 km of an eight-lane highway was counted as 1 km of road built; now, it is counted as 8 km built.

This may be the international practice, but to use it to claim that the pace of road construction has gone up manifold under the Modi regime is to deliberately mislead. Once again, a bid to inflate one’s own performance while showing another’s – the UPA government’s -- in poor light.

The third is the “record” number of tourists coming to Jammu and Kashmir after revocation of Article 370 in 2019. It is a favourite statistic of the Modi government and its handpicked ruling establishment in what’s now a Union Territory, aimed at claiming that everything is normal in Kashmir. Lt-Gov Manoj Sinha recently claimed “a 350% rise in tourist footfall compared to last year” wherein “the number of tourists is expected to cross 22.5 million, a record figure” compared to 18.8 million last year, another record figure.

Omar Abdullah, the former CM of the erstwhile state, was perplexed as despite his best efforts, the number of tourists did not go beyond 1.6 million a year. To show such a sharp rise after 2019, the unelected UT dispensation started counting pilgrims to holy sites in J&K also as tourists.

If the data is parsed carefully, it shows that in 2022, only 14% of these tourists – that includes pilgrims – visited Kashmir. This included 3.65 lakh pilgrims who came for the Amarnath Yatra. The bulk of these “tourists” were only coming to the popular Vaishno Devi shrine near Jammu. In 2022, more than 9.1 million pilgrims visited the Hindu shrine. These pilgrims are not tourists. Else, as Abdullah pointed out, the difference in the high number of tourists and the region’s limited accommodation capacity would have led to a massive shortage of hotel rooms. Again, while violence has come down in J&K in recent years, this trick of changing the method of counting to hype up numbers for political gains must be recognised.

There is a breed of mainstream commentators in today’s India who would hail this as a sign of great political campaigning. In plain and simple terms, this is deception. Calling it out is journalism. Hailing it is public relations. Some things are worth counting honestly because “many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count.” Honesty counts.