New Delhi: John Cowperthwaite, the British civil servant who helped create Hong Kong’s free-market economy, believed that governments should never collect statistics, on the off chance that they be twisted and used by authorities to call for excessive state interference.
Would Cowperthwaite have been proud of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which on Monday used questionable graphs and charts to imply that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government doesn’t need to act on skyrocketing fuel prices because things were supposedly worse under the previous governments?
On Monday evening, the BJP’s Twitter handle put out a series of four charts, all of which were titled “Truth of Hike in Petroleum Prices”.
The first of these charts – all of them are broadly similar – is quite confusing. The graph, which at first glance appears to be a bar chart of petrol prices, obeys no clear sense of scale. Even though the price of petrol on September 10, 2018 (Rs 80.73) is higher than what it was in May 2014 (Rs 71.41), the chart makes it looks like 71 is higher than 80.
In the second graph (on the right), 72.83 (September 2018) looks smaller than 30.86
If you go by the title of the charts and reckon that it’s only supposed to depict the percentage increase in petrol prices, it still makes little sense. What are the first bars, the price of petrol/diesel in May 2004, supposed to represent? There’s nothing to indicate how much the first bar is worth in terms of year-on-year percentage increase.
Furthermore, in the first graph, the 13% increase is depicted as a strangely steep drop while the 75.8% increase between 2009 and 2014 looks only slightly bigger than the 20.5% increase between 2004 and 2009.
These confusing graphs not only fail to get their point across, but instead provoked a wave of jokes and memes on Twitter.
Missing international prices
The point that the BJP wants to make, however, is clear – even if its chart was the completely wrong way to do it. As the Congress and various opposition parties protest rising prices, the BJP wanted to say that the increase in prices of petrol and diesel over the past four years hasn’t been as bad as the increase between 2009 and 2014.
While seemingly fair, there are two fundamental flaws with this argument. First, it goes against the grain of the Modi government’s stated defence of rising fuel prices. In the past week, the Centre has claimed that factors beyond its control have contributed to the rise; namely global oil prices. This then begs the question: if global oil prices are the problem, how can it point a finger towards previous governments and blame them for a bigger price rise?
Secondly, what the BJP wants to ignore is the role that taxes levied by the Centre play in determining the final retail price of petrol and diesel in India. In response to the BJP’s charts, the Congress pointed out the obvious: namely that international crude oil prices are still roughly 70% of what they were back before the Modi government assumed power in 2014.
What explains the difference? Central and state taxes on petrol and diesel.