Not In My Name, says the cow to Rupa Subramanya

Rupa Subramanya recently published her conclusion that there had indeed been a rise in ‘mob violence’ since Modi came to power. Admirers of Narendra Modi would be well advised to not dismiss Rupa Subramanya the way they may savage his blind critics. She had been a vocal champion of Prime Ministerial candidate Modi. Surely, she can’t have gone off him, unless there are reasons she knows best.
I wouldn’t dream of messing with her for two more reasons. For one, she’s an economist of some repute. I can scarcely claim any right to argue with her, save what the SM gives me. The seeming technical rigour of her article finds me totally out of depth, what with terms like structural break, Chow test, and Quant-Andrews test. There are charts too, which I can however figure out. She points to a clearly upward trending line- which everyone seems to have taken as cow-related violence.
Why? We'll see.
She’s also certain enough to name the precise moment the uptick in violence began: June 2014.
Another reason I wouldn’t cross her path is, she’s an aggressive lady. She recently attacked Anand Ranganathan on Twitter over his findings on cow-related violence, which is antipodal to her’s. I know Ranganathan to be a serious scientist, as solid in his field as Subramanya probably is in hers. He’s also unaffiliated to any particular camp and calls out stupidity in whatever ‘wing’ of politics it emanates from.
If he copped her anger, I stand no chance. So let me step out of that road.
But I have my own layman’s questions to ponder.

Let me worm into her narrative here. She says,“It’s therefore at least a logical possibility that the uptick in mob violence is driven entirely by increased reportage after the BJP’s victory, although it is questionable how plausible such a claim might be. To be true, it would require a very high level of coordination and collusion among major media houses, who further would literally have had to jump into high gear within days of the BJP victory: a conspiracy theory, in short.”
She dismisses ‘high level of coordination’ or jumping into ‘high gear within days’ as not a ‘possibility’.
Really?
For one, the anti-Modi posse has been in training since 2002. By 2014 they were a mob of minutemen.
For another, while Modi manages perceptions with great ease, he has no team that can go beyond starting Ganesh-drinks-milk variety of meme. The opposing camp on the other hand, is a well-oiled machine. They can roll out a news cycle with effortless ease the moment the dog whistle toots the topic .
The legendary MediaCrooks immortalised this news-generation skill as the Salma-Sabrina model: ”If I were to ask Stratfor where they got the 2000 and 400 number from I guess they’d tell me “from The Hindu”. Ask The Hindu they’d say from NDTV. Ask NDTV they’d say from Teesta. Ask Teesta she’ll say from Shabnam Hashmi. Ask Shabbo she’ll say from Genocide Suzy. Ask Suzy she’ll say from Barkha Dutt. Ask Barkha she’ll say from Rajdeep Sardesai. Ask Rajdeep he will say it was in The Hindu report. Ask The Hindu... Oops! There, your cycle is complete!”
Count the cited sources above: 8. That’s 8 bushfires across the English language media. They have thousands of minutemen in sync to start hundreds of them, which connect and rage. And before you can say “Holy cow”, they have a news-wave everyone hastens to react to.
You react to such news fires because you are impressed something huge is sweeping the country. You don’t pause to consider if it’s a techno production in the Ganesh-drinks-milk genre.
Never mind. If you must use what news snippets fetch up in searches, wouldn’t you probably require another tool to go with the Chow and the Quant-Andrews, say the Salma-Sabrina check? Yes, it will need to have an intuitive faculty to decide whether a news-bit is real or manufactured.
No such tool is possible, do you say? Well then, your datasets are just Google-degook.
Perhaps the best data collection is done by hitting the road. Barring that, maybe a more realistic approach to statistical analysis would be to start with news-bits from at least three layers: The English media, the vernacular and citizen sources. Trouble is vernacular and citizen news take a few days to bubble up to visibility. By then the news-arsonists have done their scare-mongering.
See this, published three days after Subramanya and Ranganathan did. It has 15 dated incidents going  back to 2014 that relate to cow thieves and cow smuggling. This Tweet thread from @AskAnshul appeared two days after Subramanya’s analysis did. It has 10 incidents from last two years, all smuggling related. He asserts he can vouch for them and appears willing to be contacted.[In quite a few incidents, cow-thieves attacked the owners]
Had the above been part of her dataset and factored in, how might she have concluded?  As it was, she had only two categories to sort the incidents into: cow-related or mob violence.  She asserted in a tweet, after her article was published, that her dataset included “RSS workers, witches, Dalits”. How is that for contempt in a person wading into the controversy? Wouldn’t you expect a professional to generate two lines? One to show how cow vigilantism trended, and another on how cow-smuggling did?
Again, Subramanya does not anywhere call the violence as being directed at Muslims, which was the narrative Lynchistan branders drove. Nor does she assert cow-related violence was on the uptick- just that there was increase in mob-violence.
How then did she grant this generosity towards the arsonists: “While calling India a Lynchistan is a loaded and charged term, if by this is meant that mob violence has been ticking upward since the BJP came to power in 2014, the data unequivocally bear this out”.
In other words, she’s okay with all mob-violence to be deemed lynching.
Look, she is almost a celebrity writer. When being published at ORFonline one would expect her to be able to command her editor. Even lowly-me gets asked if I wanted any corrections. If her findings were not conclusive as to being cow-centred -she doesn’t say they were- why did the title of her article scream like a tabloid’s and feed the driven narrative of that time? That narrative was throwing up these keywords: Muslims, cows, vigilantes, Hindutvis, lynching, beef.
All right, maybe the title slipped through; why not tweet a correction saying it misrepresents her finding? Since she didn't, does Subramanya subscribe to that drift?
She’s entitled to that, ignoring the cow mooing, ‘Not in my name’, but then, she didn’t need all statistical analysis to come to that conclusion, did she?- unless to dazzle lay folk.
Looking back, Anand Ranganathan’s seems a more prudent way. He backed his hunch, couched his conclusions in caution and called it a bogus narrative. Clearly he was aware of both the Salma-Sabrina play and the Ganesh-drinks-milk genre. Wise man, indeed.