Weaponizing Data Against Democracy

Jayati Ghosh. Project Syndicate. Feb 14, 2025.

Maintaining control over official data is at the heart of the authoritarian project, driving a fundamental shift in how public information is accessed and used. Nowhere is this more evident than in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has systematically undermined and weaponized the statistics authorities.

For those of us who have witnessed the shock-and-awe tactics of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the past decade, the events unfolding in the United States since Donald Trump returned to the White House evoke a sense of déjà vu. In India, we have learned the hard way: authoritarian leaders are often far more dangerous in their second term than in their first.

The reason is simple: by their second term, such leaders have mastered the system. They have learned how to bend institutions to their will and dismantle them when they no longer serve their interests, leaving them free to pursue their agendas aggressively.

Modi’s visit to Washington underscores the striking similarities between him and Trump. Both are known for sudden, unpredictable policy shifts, leaving opponents scrambling to respond and unsure of what comes next. Both leaders take pride in being disruptive – but selectively so. While they undermine institutions, discard longstanding norms, and erode democratic safeguards, they also protect and reward their favored interest groups.

More importantly, their governing style is rooted in a politics of division and intolerance, designed to consolidate power and enrich oligarchic capitalists – whose interests and fortunes are inextricably linked to their own – at the expense of almost everyone else. Both rely heavily on manipulating public perception, using mass media to push their favored narratives and suppress dissent.

These tactics comprise the playbook for aspiring autocrats worldwide. However different they may seem, today’s authoritarian leaders study one another closely – not to govern more effectively, but to tighten their grip on power.

Control over data is at the heart of this effort, leading to a fundamental shift in how public information is accessed and used. Even as citizens around the world are increasingly forced to provide their personal data to authoritarian leaders and their allies – like Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) acolytes – they are being denied access to the information needed to hold those leaders accountable.

Nowhere is this more evident than in India, where Modi’s government has systematically undermined and weaponized the country’s statistics authorities, once arguably the most reliable in the developing world. First, it politicized the National Statistical Commission – originally an independent expert body responsible for verifying and overseeing the collection of official data. It then targeted the Central Statistics Office, which collects most economic data, effectively destroying the CSO’s credibility. Using a routine revision of the base year for growth estimates as a pretext, the government altered the CSO’s methodology in ways that inflated growth, casting doubt on the reliability of official economic data. Similarly, the government abruptly withdrew the 2017-18 consumption expenditure survey – a key tool for assessing well-being – reportedly because it revealed declining consumption and rising poverty in rural India.

By the time the 2022-23 household expenditure survey was due, the government once again revised its methodology. Then, just before the 2024 general elections, it released a “factsheet” claiming that the poverty rate had fallen to 5%.

The government’s fear of reliable data is so extreme that it has even refused to conduct the decennial census, which was due in 2021, and has yet to confirm when it will take place. As a result, the most recent official data on India’s population, demographics, employment, and living conditions are from 2011.

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Episode 4127 - Feb 15 - Tiếng Anh - Vũ khí hóa dữ liệu chống lại dân chủ - Vina Technology at AI time