Priors

About Priors

Priors is a public record of how the Indian state acts when different parties hold power. It sets what a party does in government beside what earlier governments did in the same situation, and beside what the same party said in opposition.

It exists because memory is short and the record is long. A new generation sees today's decision without the thirty cases before it. Priors puts them side by side, with the same columns for every party.

Scope

The record starts with one question: how do governments answer protest? Permission, Section 144 or 163, internet shutdowns, detentions, charges, force, talks and concessions are concrete acts with dates, orders and sources. That makes protest a good place to test the method.

The same method can cover other powers of the state later. That happens only once the protest record is solid.

Three rules

  1. Every claim links to a dated source. No source, no claim.
  2. Every party gets the same columns. The data model, not the editor, enforces symmetry.
  3. Describe actions. Do not judge them. The reader judges.

What an entry is

One precedent is one protest and one government's answer to it. It records who was in power at the Centre and in the state, each action the government took with a date and a source, the outcome, and what parties said at the time, marked as in power or in opposition.

Entries live as YAML files in the repository under content/precedents. The schema is in content/SCHEMA.md. Add or fix an entry by pull request.

How entries get in

Priors is not a live feed. It is updated by hand, and every page shows the date it last changed. Current events can be days or weeks behind the news.

Every entry so far was drafted with help from Claude, using web search and web fetch, and added by pull request. Each entry says where it stands:

  • Draft. Not yet checked by a person. Drafts can be wrong. The source links are there so you can check.
  • Checked. A named person opened every source and confirmed each claim against it.
  • Verified. Checked, every quote matched word for word against an archived copy of its source, and quotes of living people read by a second person.

Once an entry is checked, any change to what it says is logged on the corrections page.

How sources are rated

Every outlet looks biased to someone. So Priors rates each source by the kind of evidence it is, not by who published it. The same bar applies to every party.

  1. RecordThe order, gazette, FIR, debate or the speaker's own words.
  2. CourtA judgment, court order, affidavit or inquiry report.
  3. RecordingA full recording or verbatim transcript.
  4. ReportContemporaneous reporting by a named reporter.
  5. SecondaryWire copy, unnamed byline, analysis or an NGO report.
  6. LeadWikipedia, a fact-check or an aggregator. Never enough alone.

What the state ordered needs the order, a court record, or two independent reports. What happened on the ground needs a court finding or two independent reports. What someone said needs the record, a recording, or two independent reports. Copies of one wire story count as one source. Official sources settle what the state ordered or claimed, not contested facts. Disputed numbers are shown with who gave each one.

A claim that does not yet meet this bar is held back. It is not shown or counted until it is sourced. Each entry says how many of its claims are held back.

Only words that appear exactly in the source go in quote marks. A summary of what someone said is marked as a summary. A translated quote keeps the original words and says who translated it.

Priors records the law the state used and what courts later held. It does not judge an action against any country's free-speech law.

How counts work

Each action counts for the party in power where it happened, on the day it happened. An action by the Centre counts for the party ruling the Centre. An action by a state government or its police counts for the party ruling that state on that date. Delhi Police reports to the Union Home Ministry, so its actions count for the party ruling the Centre. So do actions under President's Rule and in Union Territories run by the Centre. Court orders, commissions and protesters count for nobody.

Who governed where, and when, is in content/governments, with a source for each term. A count is a count of actions in this archive, not a measure of severity, and parties with longer time in power will have more.

Licence

Code is MIT. Content is CC BY 4.0. Sources belong to their publishers.