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 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, Verniers is now Karl Loewenstein Visiting Fellow at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

“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,” the scientific board said in an Open letter.

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. 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.