With a month to go for Lok Sabha Elections 2019, Telugu Desam Party leader and Andhra Pradesh’s IT minister, Nara Lokesh spoke extensively with The Quint on the current voter data controversy in his state and how it can impact the polls.
Lokesh, during his telephonic interview, alleged that K Chandrashekhar Rao’s Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) and Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR-Congress Party (YSR-CP) have helped each other in stealing a detailed voter database that TDP had built.
He said the data “belongs to Andhraites” and that TDP will be “fighting it in court”.
Accusing Reddy and his party of using this data to not only poach TDP supporters, Lokesh said that YSR-CP was also attempting to delete them from the electoral rolls.
Since 1 March, TDP, TRS and YSR-CP have all been locked in a tussle over voter profiling and the attempted mass deletion of voters in Andhra Pradesh. At the eye of this political data storm is an official TDP app called Seva Mitra.
Can ‘Data Theft’ Affect Polls?
Andhra Pradesh has 25 seats in Lok Sabha. According to the Election Commission of India’s electoral roll data, the state had 3.5 crore voters in 2018. The latest C-Voter Survey published on Sunday, 10 March, has predicted a close race between Lokesh’s TDP and Jaganmohan Reddy’s YSR-CP.
The survey predicts 14 seats for TDP and 11 for YSR-CP. In terms of vote share percentage, a slender margin of 2.1 percent separates the two. While TDP is projected to secure 37.4 percent of the votes, YSR-CP is expected to get 35.3 percent of the poll pie.
In this scenario, deletion from electoral rolls or poaching of voters in key constituencies can potentially swing results in a party’s favour.
At a public meeting on 5 March, YSR-Congress leader Jaganmohan Reddy and TDP’s primary Opposition in Andhra Pradesh said “there are duplicate voters and us filing Form-7 asking for these deletions with EC is wrong according to TDP”.
“Leader of Opposition Jaganmohan Reddy himself at a public programme stated that their party has used form-7 to delete voters. So, the entire irony of this game is they are doing it and TDP is getting blamed for it. It seems too convenient of a game that is going on.”Nara Lokesh, Andhra Pradesh IT Minister and Telugu Desam Party leader
‘101 Percent Sure KCR & YSR-CP Working Together’
Lokesh claimed that his party has been painstakingly building a database of its members since 1984. A membership drive in 2014 which included health insurance resulted in over 70 lakh registrations, according to a senior party advisor. A door-to-door campaign in 2017 resulted in nearly all of Andhra’s 3.5 crore voters being part of TDP’s voter database.
“We had lot of data attributes about our karyakartas (workers) and they are conveniently now going to use it against us,” said Lokesh.
“They have already started calling our karyakartas, started writing personalised letters to them,” he added.
However, when asked how he could allege with confidence that TRS and YSR-CP are involved in theft of TDP’s voter database or are even in possession of it, Lokesh asked if there was “any doubt about it”?
“101 percent they are working together. KCR goes has a good cup of coffee, spends two hours with Jaganmohan Reddy. What do you think they discussed? They were discussing Andhra elections,” said Lokesh.
‘Will Fight in Court For Our Data’
So, now that allegations have been traded and offices raided, what lies next?
At the heart of the data controversy are the voters of Andhra Pradesh whose data has been liable for misuse.
In an interesting turn of phrase, Lokesh said that “the data belongs to Andhraites”.
“We’ll go legal, we’ll put it in front of the court. There is no jurisdictional power right now and we will definitely go to the court and push that Telangana government returns the data that belongs to TDP,” said Lokesh.
When asked how he can ensure that the data hasn’t been duplicated, he replied, “correct but this is something we have to face and we have to fight.”
What About Caste, Voter Profiling Data Misuse ?
When asked about allegations by the Opposition that TDP, which is in power in Andhra Pradesh, pulled data from government-owned databases such as the Smart Pulse survey and the controversial State Resident Data Hub (SRDH) , Lokesh insisted that all the data in their Seva Mitra App was scrapped from publicly available datasets such as the Election Commission’s electoral rolls.
The Seva Mitra app, however, was also observed to have collected data on the voters’ caste.
When asked if he agreed that profiling citizens on the basis of caste can end up disproportionately affecting minorities, Lokesh said that this data was only used for reaching the “last mile voter” for the state’s welfare programmes.
“In the village everyone knows a voter belongs to which community and so on. If we use it against it or use it in a certain way then yes, we are at fault. All we are doing is analytics so that we can actually reach out and appeal to those voter bases and build on it.”Nara Lokesh, IT Minister, Govt of Andhra Pradesh and TDP Leader
“All depends on how as a political party we are using it. In terms of our entire welfare programme we have not used party data. How do you look at the glass – half empty or half full – Because i’m also IT minister we have also done a real time census survey,” he said.
“What has happened is we have real-time data so that whenever we launch a new program, we are able to ensure the benefits of the programme have reached the last mile. Earlier in pension the leakage was north of 20 percent, we cut it down,” he added.
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