Thread by @jamewils

Rather than using numbers as a critical tool to inform policymaking, Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata party treat data as an important input for a political narrative about Modi leading India to its rightful place in the pantheon of world powers.

Inconvenient figures that may undermine these claims are either twisted, or buried.

The BJP’s creative use of numbers has made a bad situation worse.

ft.com/content/bd99a1…

“The BJP understands that the common man in general doesn’t really understand data.

They decide what the dominant narrative should be;

they try to find data that would support it, and they try to suppress data that would counter it.”

pointed out @ShivamShankarS

Modi’s Govt had fraught relations with data even before the pandemic.

Before India’s last general elections, New Delhi stopped the release of unemployment data that showed Modi’s failure to deliver on promised job creation, prompting the head of the NSC to resign.

Estimates of gross domestic product growth under the BJP were also revised sharply upwards, leading top economists to warn that the statistical machinery was “controlled by political considerations”.

But Covid-19 has brought political number management to the fore. “You have had a focus on whatever metric or measure of the pandemic appears to create the most optimistic narrative,” says mathematician Murad Banaji, of Middlesex University London.

My observation is almost all Governments used this convenient metrics suiting to narrative to show that they are managing the COVID-19 in a better way.

If you go through the metrics they changed through the course of pandemic gives a fair idea of clever political narrative 😉