Cambridge Analytica fall-out sets off alarms in India
The controversy over Cambridge Analytica, the British company accused of harvesting Facebook data to influence politics, has spread to India.
Evidence that CA’s chief executive, its parent company and a local affiliate were involved in Indian elections has prompted the country’s two biggest political parties, the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, to accuse each other of using the unethical practices CA is accused of.
Ravi Shankar Prasad, the BJP government’s IT Minister, claimed that CA was already running outreach and social media for the Congress president, Rahul Gandhi, and that the company and the party had agreed to work together in next year’s general election. He also pointed out that the company’s partner in India, Ovleno Business Intelligence, listed the party’s youth wing in the state of Jharkhand as a client.
“My question to the party is whether, to win elections, Congress will depend on data manipulation and theft of data?” Mr Prasad said. “Will the Congress now depend on data manipulation and theft to woo the voters? Will they adopt sex, sleaze and fake news to win elections?”
Randeep Surjewala, a Congress spokesman, denied that his party had ever employed the company. In turn, he alleged that the BJP had hired Ovleno to work on its successful general election campaign in 2014.
Founded in 2010, Ovleno partnered with Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), CA’s parent company, the following year to set up SCL India, a company that collects voter data, researches caste stratifications and advises electoral campaigns.
Alexander Nix, the recently suspended chief executive of CA, is listed as one of the directors of SCL India.
SCL India has offices in 10 Indian states, 300 employees and 1,400 consulting staff, according to Ovleno’s website, which the company took offline on Wednesday. SCL India has no website of its own.
Ovleno had previously worked with the Congress party, the BJP and a regional party called the Janata Dal (United) in several state elections, the website said.
CA’s website says that it worked on “in-depth electorate analysis” in Bihar during a state election in 2010, giving its client, the Janata Dal (United), “a landslide victory”.
Since CA was set up only in 2013, the reference to the 2010 election is likely to refer to Ovleno’s work in Bihar.
Himanshu Sharma, an Ovleno director, said on his LinkedIn profile that he “successfully managed four election campaigns” for the BJP and helped it achieve “its target of Mission 272+” – the party’s campaign to win more than 272 seats in parliament in 2014.
Mr Sharma has removed references to the 2014 election from his LinkedIn page.
The Hindustan Times newspaper reported that Ovleno and CA were jointly in talks with the Congress and the BJP to consult on their 2019 general election campaigns.
Ovleno’s chief executive, Amrish Tyagi, could not be reached yesterday for comment. He has previously denied that Ovleno conducts Cambridge Analytica-style profiling of voters.
There has been no indication that Ovleno and SCL India harvested data from social media the way CA did ahead of the 2016 US presidential election. But the IT minister told Facebook that its data on Indians was not to be used or sold for political purposes.
“If any data theft of Indians is done with the collusion of Facebook, this shall not be tolerated,” Mr Prasad said in a warning to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive.