In an article posted on the website Newslaundry on 14 October, Rupa Subramanya argues that government statistics do not support the view that “there’s been some sort of upsurge in communal violence since the election of Narendra Modi”, contending that figures that show an increase of 25% in communal incidents in January-May 2015 vs. January-May …
Continue reading BJP-ruled states still more communally violent
In a pointed analysis on Scroll.in using data from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Shivam Vij shows that the rate of rioting in India (per 100,000 population) has fallen continuously since 1992, reaching a plateau around 2003 and remaining pretty much constant since then. Vij is correct that the Manmohan Singh years have been the most …
Continue reading Manmohan years still most peaceful despite riots uptick in 2012/13
Following Chris's response to my previous post, correctly questioning whether it makes sense to use vaguely defined "incidents" to measure communal violence, it took me a while to locate better data. I found some up-to-date statistics on casualties of communal violence in a table annexed to a 10 December 2013 Ministry of Home Affairs reply to a question …
If anyone needed proof that a course in statistical inference is necessary for journalists, it was provided by this report in the newspaper Mail Today on incidents of communal violence between 2011 and 2013 (written by Abhishek Bhalla). There was even a tweet: https://twitter.com/gauravcsawant/status/432400629794095104 The main claim in the article was: The Congress has always found …
Continue reading How Mail Today got its analysis of communal violence exactly wrong
Chunauti 