Post-Truth Politics in India’s Right-Wing Ecosystem: An Extended Critical Commentary

Abstract

ABSTRACT The right-wing movement in India received an impetus in 2014 with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), capturing governmental power at the national level. Among the fundamental traits of the right-wing movement in India, as in America, is what is called post-truth. The latter is a condition where blatant lies (or half-truths) are deliberately produced and spread on a massive scale, for an ideological and political purpose. The post-truth condition has important intellectual and political implications. For example, given its commitment to claims that are without any objective basis, the right-wing movement sees society as divided into groups on the basis of subjective criteria (e.g., religion). Thus it denies the objective basis for seeing a society as class-society. It also concomitantly denies the state as class-state. A directly political implication of post-truthism is the accumulation of lies by means of the suppression of dissent. The right-wing movement, including its post-truthism, does not hang in the air, however. It has a solid political-economic foundation. This article critically discusses the post-truth character of India’s right-wing movement, and explains how it is that the overall character of India’s capitalist economy is behind this. The broader arguments of the article have wider applicability beyond India.