Fascistic Hostility to Evidence
Prabhat Patnaik
All fascistic outfits have one common characteristic: they reject outright all evidence that goes against the narrative they spin; and the Hindutva elements in power in India are no exception. Their narrative presents India as the fastest growing economy in the world where the people never had it so good; but if evidence collected by international agencies or even by the government’s own agencies shows otherwise, then that evidence must be wrong. The credo of India’s fascistic Hindutva outfit is simple: the reality is what Modi says, if evidence shows otherwise then it must be wrong, and, most likely, the product of a nefarious terrorist conspiracy.
There is a fundamental difference between an outright rejection and a critique. If the Hindutva elements critiqued the evidence, then that would be a perfectly worthwhile activity, since all critique is intellectually productive: it leads either to a refinement of the method of collecting evidence, or to a different interpretation of the available evidence from the one commonly read into it, or to a redirection of focus to an altogether different body of evidence; it leads in short to a deepening of understanding. But engaging in any such intellectual activity, such as a critique of the evidence, is beyond the capacity of the Hindutva elements; they can only reject outright any evidence contrary to their spin, without ever explaining why a particular piece of evidence should not be taken into account for assessing the validity of their claims.
I shall illustrate my point with reference to three such episodes of rejection of evidence by the Modi government. The first relates to the 2017-18 National Sample Survey on consumer expenditure. These surveys, it may be recalled, had been designed by Professor P C Mahalanobis the distinguished statistician of the country way back in the 1950s; every five years there was a large sample survey which in fact was the largest regular periodic sample survey in the world, and which, notwithstanding all its limitations that are bound to exist in any such exercise, provided valuable material for generations of researchers in India and abroad.
The 2017-18 quinquennial survey, however, reportedly showed a dismal picture with regard to poverty in the country, because of which the Modi government not only prevented the findings of the survey from becoming public, but ended these surveys altogether. From what had “leaked out” before the suppression occurred, the real per capita rural consumer expenditure had declined by as much as 9 per cent between 2011-12 and 2017-18, on the basis of which the proportion of rural population unable to access 2200 calories per person per day (the original official benchmark for defining rural poverty) was estimated to have increased from 68 per cent in 2011-12 to 78.5 per cent in 2017-18.
Instead of being alarmed by this evidence, or even testing its verisimilitude by conducting a fresh survey (as the UPA government had done in 2011-12 because of the high levels of poverty shown by the original quinquennial survey of 2009-10), or setting up a committee of experts to examine the implications of the survey and the possible remedial measures that could be adopted, the NDA government just suppressed the findings and abandoned all future surveys! This is the typical fascistic response to evidence contrary to their claims.
My second example relates to the National Family Health Survey 5 which was conducted over the period 2019-21. This showed that compared to the previous NFHS 4 which was carried out in 2015-16, the incidence of anaemia in both children and women, which was already very high, had registered an alarming increase. While 59 per cent of children between the ages of 6 months and 59 months were anaemic in 2015-16, the figure for 2019-21 had risen to 67 per cent. What is more, the incidence of moderate to severe anaemia had risen from 30.6 per cent to 38.1 per cent between these two dates, while the incidence of mild anaemia had remained unchanged at 28.4 and 28.9 per cent respectively. Likewise among women (up to age of 49 years) there had been an increase in the incidence of anaemia between these two periods from 53 per cent to 57 per cent; the increase in moderate to severe anaemia was from 28.4 per cent to 31.4 percent. Even among men up to the age of 49 years, where the incidence of anaemia was much lower and rose by a smaller margin, from 23 per cent to 25 per cent, the incidence of moderate to severe anaemia rose from 5 per cent to 8 per cent. Rural children and adults showed a higher incidence of anaemia than the average, and children of anaemic mothers were at a higher risk of being anaemic.
What was the government’s response to these findings? Instead of showing any concern over these alarming findings, calling experts to discuss their veracity and implications and also the urgent steps to be taken to reverse the trend, which any government with an iota of concern for the people would have done, it simply suspended on a trumped-up charge the director of the institution, the International Institute of Population Studies, that had carried out the NFHS.(The trumped-up nature of the charge is evident from the fact that the suspension was lifted when the director resigned). That again was the typical fascistic response.
My third example relates to the Global Hunger Index. The Index for 2023 shows India occupying the 111th rank among a total of 125 countries for whom it is compiled (it is not compiled for countries with low levels of hunger); what is more, India’s rank is lower than that of our immediate neighbours, Pakistan (102nd), Bangladesh (81st), Sri Lanka (60th) and Nepal (69th), and has been falling over time.
Again, what was the government’s response to these extremely disturbing findings? Not an iota of shock, not an iota of concern, but simple outright rejection, with one cabinet minister even making utterly ill-informed and facetious remarks about them. The Global Hunger Index is calculated from four parameters: undernourishment, under-five mortality rate, child stunting (height compared to age) and child wasting (weight compared to height). Even if one accepts for a moment the government’s claim that these parameters are heavily influenced by the state of children rather than of adults, the index still shows that the state of children is abysmal in India compared to the rest of the world; this in other words does not constitute any ground for ignoring the finding of the GHI.
The minister had facetiously claimed that she too was hungry because she was travelling the whole day and would have said so if telephoned to inquire about her state of nutrition; the under-nutrition information going into the construction of the GHI, which was based on polling 3000 respondents in India, was therefore suspect, warranting a rejection of the GHI as a whole.
Three points however need to be made in this context: first, under-nutrition is only one of four parameters entering the GHI; second, even for assessing under-nutrition the GHI relies not just on polling respondents but also on food balance sheets of each country, derived from official data themselves; and third, the reason for polling respondents lies precisely in the discontinuation of the consumer expenditure surveys that the BJP government itself has ordered.
It should be remembered that India’s rank in the GHI, though sliding over time, has been abysmally low for quite a while, even before the consumer expenditure surveys were discontinued by the BJP government and the method of polling respondents was perforce resorted to. The coexistence of acute and growing hunger, together with high rates of GDP growth, has in other words been a perennial feature of the neo-liberal regime, even before the fascistic elements had come to power; they have only continued and accentuated the trend. The claim that polling respondents to assess hunger is responsible for showing India in a poor light is therefore additionally flawed, in addition to the above-mentioned reasons, for two further reasons: first, this method is used for all countries, not just for India, since other countries do not have the elaborate sample surveys that India used to have; and second, India’s low rank is not caused by the polling respondents method, for it predates the use of this method.
The fact that so many different indices prepared by so many different agencies, each using different sources, point to a state of acute and growing nutritional deprivation in India, even when GDP growth has apparently been occurring at a high rate, is a matter to be taken seriously. The fact that the fascistic government of the country, instead of showing any concern, simply rejects this evidence, shows its true colours. At this rate it will only destroy the entire statistical infrastructure of the country that had been erected with such great care.
(Prabhat Patnaik is Professor Emeritus at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Courtesy: Prabhat Patnaik’s blog at networkideas.org.)
When Numbers are Treated as Political Weapons
Jayati Ghosh
No government in India has been as adept in shaping the political narrative as the Modi government since 2014. This has been accomplished through a domination of most of the mainstream media, significant control over social media, ruthless intimidation and repression of dissident voices, and reliance on a web of disseminators on the ground. A critical aspect of this has been the ability to control, manipulate and suppress official data in ways that are designed to conform to the desired narrative.
This means that an aggressive attitude towards economic statistics and indeed to all data that could force some accountability has become one of the defining features of the government. As a result, a national statistical system that was once the pride of India and the envy of most developing countries is now weakened, eroded and increasingly less reliable.
On the face of it, this may seem like a contradictory, even self-defeating, strategy for any government. After all, even minimal governance requires some basic knowledge about those who are to be governed—at the very least, how many people there are and where they are. Much more information is required to be effective in improving the conditions of the people: about how they live, work and earn; about disparities in income and wealth; about access to basic needs including food, health, housing, sanitation; about levels of education and skill; about ecological conditions and much more.
India’s statistical system was remarkable for a relatively poor country. Even before independence, the decennial Census exercise of the colonial government provided some basic information. From the early 1950s, India’s statisticians sought to develop methodologies for surveys that could capture consumption expenditure and employment changes and patterns, using imaginative techniques suited to an economy that was largely informal. These were periodically tweaked as gaps and anomalies were recognised. National income indicators like the gross domestic product (GDP) were developed in conformity with the UN’s System of National Accounts. As economic planning developed, other official data were generated, such as input-output tables and human development indicators that also recognised different social categories. Poverty estimates were based on data generated through the consumption surveys, and other backwardness criterions based on survey data also became important for policy formulation.
But since 2014, several moves have dramatically changed the availability and reliability of such essential data. This began with the revision of the base year for estimates of national income, an exercise which occurs every few years. The change to the new base year of 2011-12 brought changes in methodology. An important change was in how industrial output is measured, shifting away from mainly using the Index of Industrial Production, which is a physical measure of output. Now company reports are used, even though that data includes a significant proportion (around a third) of dummy companies, shows very wide fluctuations and can reflect incentives for companies to misstate their returns. This led to a dramatic increase in manufacturing output that was not confirmed by other economic indicators and appears to have been designed to present the Modi government in a better light than the previous one.
Next, though the results of the Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2017-18 were available in late 2018, they were withheld from the public until after the 2019 elections, presumably because they indicated stagnant or declining employment and high rates of open unemployment. Even worse, the results of the survey on consumption expenditure for 2017-18 were withdrawn and the government simply refused to release the data. A leaked report procured by journalists indicated alarming declines in rural consumption and significant increases in rural poverty between 2011-2012 and 2017-2018. Since then, no fresh consumption survey has even been conducted, even though that is essential for assessing the extent of absolute poverty, food consumption and inequality. So there is no information on how these crucial indicators have moved after 2011-12—more than a decade ago.
In the absence of essential and comparable data on poverty, the Niti Aayog has developed its own indicator—an index based on a collection of different estimates including mobile phone usage. All too predictably, this index shows a sharp decline in poverty in the country over the past decade, conforming to the preferred official narrative.
The Covid pandemic provided an excuse for the government to delay the Census that should have been conducted in 2021, even though other major infection-spreading events like assembly elections and associated rallies continued. Remarkably, there has been no attempt to conduct the Census since then and it has officially been delayed “until further notice”, presumably until after the next general elections. Since the last Census data relates to 2011, both the government and the public are now functioning in ignorance of the most basic data: how many people there are in the country, where, of what gender and age, and doing what.
Not only has the central government refused to conduct the national Census thus far, it is also resisting the efforts of state governments to try and fill the gap by attempting their own enumeration. The caste census, conducted by the Bihar government and now proposed in several other states, is being bitterly opposed by the central government, even though this should provide important information also on location, living and working conditions.
Other data that could shed light on the success or usefulness of government policies are also suppressed. The government’s own audit of the Ganga Action Plan, for example, has simply not been released. When one of the few remaining official surveys, the National Family Health Survey for 2019-2021, revealed that open defaecation still existed despite official claims to the contrary and that the incidence of anaemia had increased among women and girls, the government response was not to consider how this can be improved, but to punish the messenger. The head of the agency that conducts the survey was suspended on vague charges, presumably as punishment. This obviously sends a signal to the person in charge of the currently ongoing survey not to publish any results that could potentially embarrass the government.
None of this suppression of data would make sense for a government interested in developing and implementing economic policies that would benefit the people, because it is hard to implement policies in such ignorance of the people for whom they are intended. This instead suggests maximum government with minimum governance: a state focused on control and the management of public perception, rather than positively changing the reality.
(Jayati Ghosh is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Courtesy: The author’s blog at networkideas.org.)
