Founder "Forced To Leave": Ashoka University's Political Data Centre Board

The scientific board of Trivedi Centre for Political Data at the Ashoka University has announced that it is dissolving itself alleging that its founder and director Gilles Verniers was "forced to leave".

The university, however, said Mr Verniers's departure is due to him not meeting the stringent criteria on continuation of service.

The members of the scientific board included former CEC SY Quraishi; Professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King's College London Christophe Jaffrelot; Professor of Political Science, University of Oslo, Francesca Jensenius; Senior Fellow and Director of the South Asia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Milan Vaishnav; Mukulika Banerjee (London School of Economics and Political Science); Susan Ostermann (University of Notre Dame) and Tariq Thachil ( University of Pennsylvania).

After having left Ashoka, where he was an Assistant Professor of Political Science, Mr Verniers is now Karl Loewenstein Visiting Fellow at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

In an open letter, the scientific board said, "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".

"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," the letter said.

For its part, the university said Mr Verniers' departure is due to him not clearing the university's stringent tenure process, which in his case happened almost a year ago.

"Faculty who do not qualify for tenure exit the university within three semesters. Professor Verniers has not been teaching at Ashoka for the last one year, and has now chosen to leave the university. The university appreciates Prof Verniers' many contributions as a teacher and towards building a strong reference source of political data for researchers and students," the varsity said in a statement.

The university also said some its centres and offices are planned to be integrated with the newly established Centre for Data Sciences and Analytics (CDSA) in an effort to enhance its data-driven capabilities and fostering a readily accessible collection of data sets.

"The Trivedi Centre for Political Data (TCPD) is among them, and TCPD's proposed integration with the new Centre has been communicated to the TCPD Scientific Board recently," it said.

According to the board, 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," the letter read.

The letter comes weeks after a controversy at the university following resignation of Assistant Professor Sabyasachi Das after a controversy over his research paper which argued that the BJP won a disproportionate share of closely contested parliamentary seats in 2019 Lok Sabha polls, especially in states where it was the ruling party at the time.

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