By : Mehwash Fatima, Sub Editor-ICN
NEW DELHI: The 21st century is widely popular and known as the post-truth era nowadays. The question here is; what post-truth is? What it has to do with the current scenario of the world?
Post-truth is a philosophical concept which tells about an environment in which personal beliefs and opinions are considered more important than facts.
Ruling parties have been using emotional appeals to influence public opinions.
It has become the most common practice nowadays.
While some observers take it as a long-term part of the political culture that was less notable before the arrival of the internet and related societal changes, others take it as a contemporary problem.
In 2016, post-truth got chosen as the Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year due to its frequency in the context of that year’s Brexit referendum and media coverage of the US presidential election.
As of 2018, political commentators have acknowledged post-truth politics as dominant in many nations, particularly Australia, Brazil, Russia, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and many more. As with other areas of debate, this is being driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media and fake news websites.
Amulya Gopalakrishnan, the columnist for The Times of India, identified resemblances amid the Trump and Brexit campaigns on the one hand, and hot-button issues in India such as the Ishrat Jahan case and the case against Teesta Setalvad on the other, where allegations of forged evidence and historical revisionism have resulted in an ideological impasse,
India’s post-truth era has never been limited to a single year, its intricacies go back generations. But the important infliction point is the election of Narendra Modi in 2014. Since then, the country has experienced a majoritarian rule with widely reported discrimination against minorities.
India’s version of post-truth is different from its Western equivalents due to the country’s socioeconomic status; its per capita nominal income is less than 3% of that of the US (or 4% of that of the UK). Still, post-truth is all over the place in India.
It is easily visible in our educated teachers not present in schools, our blooming wall street but failing main streets, and our villages that lack infrastructure. We Indians can influence so many without having a good governance ability and basic living needs.
Today the ruling party has mind-washed the nation by making us believe how important unnecessary things are; they succeeded in winning our trust that all this is for our good.
Recent demonetization is a clear example of it, which pushed our country into a devastating crisis that hit people hard. The Central bank was totally against it.
Despite the levels of extreme poverty in India, when it comes to social development, the cult of growth dominates over the development policy, a trend that Modi has aggravated, but that started with past governments.
