As the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) in India belatedly published its crime-statistics reports for the year 2017 on 21 October 2019, the debate circled back around crime data and its categorisation. Even though NCRB had recorded data for newly introduced categories of mob lynching, and hate violence for its 2017 report, these statistics do not find a place in the final published document. The reason behind it, the Home Ministry states, is that the data has errors which need to be rectified.
Political Violence and Justice Lab, an initiative by the research and journalism organisation The Polis Project, has for over a year been undertaking an extensive exercise of building a database on incidents of collective violence which includes two or more perpetrators since the year 2000. This exercise aims to analyse the impact of hate and violence on Indian society and the effects of political violence on issues of justice. Violence Lab also recorded incidents of violence during the general elections of 2019, which included cases of violence near polling stations and elsewhere. Recently the initiative has also taken up the task of tabulating mass graves across the world since the beginning of the 20th century.
Vasundhara Sirnate, the director of research at The Polis Project, who is heading this project speaks about recent developments regarding the NCRB, crime statistics and their analyses, and the data set that The Polis Project is working on. The conversation also touches upon larger issues of data collection, its analysis and intelligible representation for the public, the importance of violence-related data, and its role in decoding power dynamics and politics in society.
Sumit Chaturvedi: What was the motivation behind the Political Violence and Justice Lab?