The Sunday Guardian article which made startling revelations that the Congress party and the party president was allegedly conned by his own team of trusted lieutenants into believing that the party was clearly winning the Lok Sabha elections and Rahul Gandhi was definitely becoming the Prime Minister of India.
The report revealed how his ‘Big Data’ head, Praveen Chakravarty billed the party Rs 24 crore for his services and has since been untraceable. Not only he ended up providing dubious and misleading data to the party president but also never gave a copy of the disc where he had collected the data, said the report. Chakravarty was the founding trustee of the dubious database with faulty ‘fact-checker’, IndiaSpend.
Since the news of his allegedly conning the Congress party went viral on social media, more and more stories and claims relating to him have since come forward. A report published by Economic Times throws more light on the same. As per the ET report, Chakravarty sent an email to the data analytics department of Congress detailing his reflections on how his shady data failed to give correct projections for Congress. Chakravarty washes his hands off the poll debacle and says how there is nothing much we (data analytics department) could have done. The mail reportedly did not mention the failure of Shakti app, Congress’ data app, from trying to read the Modi wave in the second term.
ET report mentions how Congress has become an echo-chamber where everyone concerned tells the party president what he wants to hear. As per a party functionary, about 30-40% data in an earlier variation of Shakti app was fake in Karnataka, where it was launched before the May 2018 state assembly elections. Three months later, when Shakti app was launched, focus was on volume of data collected. A competition was also held where the one who collected most data would get to meet the party President Rahul Gandhi. Without checks in place, more fake data was collected. As per the report, about 50-70% of the data collected through Shakti app was fake.
As per the report, the access to the Shakti app was tightly controlled and even within the team members didn’t know what the other member was working on. The article then states how a private individual, one William Chitla, an associate of Chakravarty’s and a Bengaluru based IT-entrepreneur along with Chakravarty was at one point calling the shots regarding Shakti app. However, as per ET, Chitla has denied having been associated with Shakti app. ET journalist who reported this story shared on Twitter the questions he had sent to Chakravarty as well but he claims he has not received any response yet.
So much was the lack of coordination that the Congress IT cell, which didn’t get any data from the data analytics team, ran its own parallel data research and even hired a British polling agency, ‘You-Gov’. The report, without naming any senior functionary within the Congress, says that Chakravarty fed the Rafale controversy into Rahul Gandhi’s head but a lot of senior leaders didn’t really follow the Rafale bogey Rahul was riding on.
Meanwhile, Robert Vadra’s relative and Congress supporter Tehseen Poonawalla took to Twitter to reveal how he had once red-flagged Chakravarty’s grip over Congress.
He even floated conspiracy theory that some people within Congress itself want Rahul Gandhi ousted and hence set him up for it.
He even suggested Rahul Gandhi’s teammates are afraid of ‘alpha humans’, perhaps referring to himself as one.
Meanwhile, after maintaining stoic silence for almost a month over social media, Praveen Chakravarty today took to Twitter to refute all the allegations in the media and said that he and his team continue to operate out of the Congress headquarters as usual.
He called these reports ‘lies’ and ‘plain rubbish’.
From the report in Sunday Guardian and the current Economic Times report and everything which is being discussed on social media, one thing comes out clearly is that the grand old party seems keen on pushing the blame on to someone, anyone except the party leadership. In Chakravarty, they seem to have found a perfect scapegoat. Rahul Gandhi is portrayed as the gullible one who got taken for a ride by Chakravarty and everyone else. How does he then expect the voters to take him seriously as a leader who could lead a country of 1.3 billion? That he is so weak that he cannot apply his own brains?
How does the so-called fake data in Shakti app and said data mainpulation by Chakravarty explain Rahul Gandhi’s loss from Amethi, a place which voted for the Nehru-Gandhi family, election after election, purely out of emotional connect? How does this explain Congress losing all the seats in Rajasthan, where the party is in power in state? And what explains the other high-profile leaders like Jyotiraditya Scindia, Digvijaya Singh, Mallikarjun Kharge, Veerappa Moily losing?
To quote Congress President himself, the emperor was naked but nobody around him had the courage to tell him.
