'Rahul Gandhi must apologise': BJP gets fresh ammo as CSDS' Sanjay Kumar retracts data on Maharashtra polls citing error

Sanjay Kumar, co-director of Lokniti-CSDS retracted his posts on Maharashtra voter data and issued an apology.

The Bharatiya Janata Party received a shot in the arm as psephologist and co-director of Lokniti-CSDS issued a public apology and retracted the data regarding the number of voters in Maharashtra Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, citing errors in comparison.

"I sincerely apologize for the tweets posted regarding Maharashtra elections.

Error occurred while comparing data of 2024 LS and 2024 AS. The data in row was misread by our Data team. The tweet has since been removed. I had no intention of dispersing any form of misinformation," Sanjay Kumar said in a post on X on Tuesday.

The findings put out by Lokniti-CSDS showed sharp fluctuations in the number of voters across four Maharashtra constituencies -- two showing steep drops and two showing dramatic spikes between the 2024 Lok Sabha and Assembly elections to suggest massive deletions or unexplained additions to voter rolls.

Several Congress leaders also picked up the findings to bolster their claims of "vote-chori" or "voter theft" and advance their allegations of the Election Commission of India indulging in voter fraud.

BJP leaders, including I-T cell head Amit Malviya and spokesperson Shehzad Poonawalla, posted screenshots of the now-deleted tweets, including one by Congress MP Pawan Khera, to claim that the data shared by Sanjay Kumar had been used to accuse the poll panel of allowing 40% of voters to disappear in some constituencies and claim that some others saw an unexplained increase.

Armed with Kumar's apology and the retraction of his tweets featuring the Lokniti-CSDS data, the BJP ripped into Congress MP and Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi and demanded that he issue an unconditional apology for his "callous and regressive politics".

"The very institution whose data Rahul Gandhi leaned on to defame the voters of Maharashtra has now admitted that its figures were wrong — not just on Maharashtra, but even on SIR. Where does this leave Rahul Gandhi and the Congress, which brazenly targeted the Election Commission and went so far as to brand genuine voters as fake? Shameful. Rahul Gandhi must immediately abandon his “Ghuspaithiya Bachao Yatra" in Bihar and tender an unconditional apology to the people of India for his callous and regressive politics," Malviya said in a post on X.

Pooawalla said that the Congress had used the CSDS data to launch an attack on the ECI. "Sanjay Kumar of CSDS admits his data on Maharashtra was fake. Based on this fakery Congress ecosystem attacked ECI. Will Congress apologise for insulting Maharashtra and its great people?" he said.

In his now-deleted posts on X, Sanjay Kumar Kumar shared two sets of data under the title “Some information of Maharashtra election." Together, they included data from four constituencies. In Ramtek, he claimed the number of voters had dropped from 4.66 lakh in the Lok Sabha polls to 2.86 lakh in the Assembly election, a decline of 38.45 per cent.

Devlali showed a similar pattern, with voters allegedly falling from 4.56 lakh to 2.88 lakh, a drop of 36.82 per cent.

In contrast, Nashik West appeared to have seen a surge of 47.38 per cent, with voters increasing from 3.28 lakh in the national election to 4.83 lakh in the state polls. Hingna also seemed to reflect an unusual rise, jumping from 3.14 lakh to 4.50 lakh, an increase of 43.08 per cent.

The development comes amid a sustained attack by the Congress and other Opposition parties against the Election Commission accusing the poll panel of enabling large scale manipulation of voter lists with an intent to benefit the BJP.