Christophe Jaffrelot is senior research fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, Paris, professor of Indian Politics and Sociology at King's India Institute, London, and non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He offers valuable insights on South Asian politics, particularly the methods and motivations of the Hindu right in India.
Disinformation campaigns shrink the possibilities of genuine debate ahead of polls
Five years ago, a famous line was “The Nation Wants to Know”. Today, it seems that, even if it wanted to know, it cannot.
Truth used to be a major concern in India’s public sphere. The word was part of ideological “brands”, ranging from the title of the book by Swami Dayananda Saraswati (founder of the Arya Samaj), Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth), to the name of Jyotirao Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj (The Truth Seekers Society) and the title of another book, Mahatma Gandhi’s “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”. One hundred years later, untruth has become pervasive, banal and the new normal. Last month, a Microsoft report revealed that “India has more fake news than any other country in the world”. The ruling party, whose responsibility it is to be a role model, contributes to this state of things, by action or omission.
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