The scientific board of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data at Ashoka University has announced that it will be dissolving itself, while expressing concern that they were not adequately informed or consulted regarding crucial decisions made concerning the Centre.
In their open letter, the board mentioned that Professor Gilles Verniers, the founder and director of the Centre, was “forced to leave.”
Gilles Verniers, who was the founder and director of the Trivedi Centre for Political Data at Ashoka University, is now Karl Loewenstein Visiting Fellow at Amherst College in Massachusetts.
“TCPD’s vibrant and important agenda, under the leadership of founding Director Professor Gilles Verniers, is what attracted each of us to serve on its Scientific Board, and contribute to its intellectual mission. We now write to state our regret that the Centre’s founder and director was forced to leave, and that the university did not inform the Centre’s scientific board about decisions that affect not only the leadership of the Centre but also its future as an institution’” read the letter.
The board members comprised reputed academics from across the world and a former Indian chief election commissioner.
Read the full text of the letter here:
Open letter from the Trivedi Centre for Political Data’s Scientific Board
The empirical study of democracy and elections requires evidence. For years, research on Indian elections and democracy was limited by the absence of publicly available data. Scholars had to wait for months after an election to access Election Commission of India (ECI) statistical reports, which came in all sorts of formats, none of them readily usable. The Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) at Ashoka University changed this situation by providing quality open-access data in real time and by conducting cutting edge analysis of India’s elections.
TCPD’s vibrant and important agenda, under the leadership of founding Director Professor Gilles Verniers, is what attracted each of us to serve on its Scientific Board, and contribute to its intellectual mission. We now write to state our regret that the Centre’s founder and director was forced to leave, and that the university did not inform the Centre’s scientific board about decisions that affect not only the leadership of the Centre but also its future as an institution.
TCPD was initially built around the research of Dr. Gilles Verniers, who analyzed the electoral politics of Uttar Pradesh and expanded his work to all states and national elections. While teaching at the Young India Fellowship in 2014, Dr. Verniers assembled a data unit with the help of Young India Fellows and in collaboration with colleagues outside the university. He collaborated with Dr. Francesca Jensenius, who had assembled the first version of the dataset on India’s national and state elections, which became the foundation for the development of the Lok Dhaba database. Both Dr. Verniers and Dr. Jensenius were co-recipients of the Lipset/Przeworski/Verba Best Dataset Prize from the American Political Science Association in 2023, our profession’s highest recognition for public data contributions.
In its seven years of operation, scholars at TCPD have produced 16 groundbreaking datasets, led 20 research projects, organized 80 research seminars, published 20 research papers and book chapters, and organized two major conferences on computational social sciences. The team has also published more than 300 analytical articles in the Indian press and built high-quality academic partnerships. In 2017, it was awarded the label of ‘International Research Partner’ from the Centre for National Scientific Research (CNRS) in France, in association with CERI-SciencesPo.
Currently, data made public through the TCPD website is a primary source for nearly all scholarship and commentary on Indian politics. The data are frequently used by scholars and journalists and have a substantial impact on the research and coverage of Indian elections. These data have also found their way into other major public data repositories, including the CLEA dataset at the University of Michigan and the SHRUG database from the Development Data Lab, to name a few.
Importantly, the TCPD Data Centre’s influence is not limited to data and research projects alone. It has also played an important role for students from Ashoka and beyond. In seven years, TCPD researchers have mentored 125 interns, mostly from Ashoka. Its summer program has trained large numbers of students and data journalists. Eight of its collaborators, all Ashoka graduates, have been admitted to prestigious PhD programs.
TCPD also built partnerships with scholars and institutions from across the world. Last year, it hosted two Fulbright scholars. It is no exaggeration to say that the Centre has had, in its short existence, a transformative impact on the field of Indian electoral politics.
Given this track record of excellence, we were surprised and disappointed that we, as the Scientific Board, were not consulted before substantial changes were made governing how the Centre is run and situated within its home institution, in breach of academic norms.
Under such circumstances, we, signatories of this letter, are dissolving TCPD’s Scientific board. We commit to supporting Gilles Verniers’ and his partners’ efforts to maintain the future and the integrity of the data and of the work associated with it.
We recognize Ashoka’s contribution to the development of TCPD and we are grateful for the efforts that made TCPD such a success. We will, guided by academic norms, ensure that Ashoka continues to be recognized for the existing publicly released data.
Christophe Jaffrelot
Research Director at CERI-SciencesPo/CNRS
Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King’s College London
Scientific Board Chair, Trivedi Centre for Political Data Centre
Francesca Jensenius
Professor of Political Science, University of Oslo
Milan Vaishnav
Senior Fellow and Director of the South Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Mukulika Banerjee
Associate Professor of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science
Susan Ostermann
Assistant Professor of Global Affairs and Political Science at the Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame.
S.Y. Quraishi
Former CEC, Distinguished Fellow and Advisory Board Member, Trivedi Centre for Political Data Centre
Tariq Thachil
Director, Centre for the Advanced Study of India and Madan Lal Sobti Professor for the Study of Contemporary India, University of Pennsylvania
