POST-TRUTH POLITICS: A STUDY OF ELECTION TO PUNJAB LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY

Authors

  • Jasmeet Singh Asst. Professor Political Science, Dev Samaj College for Women, Ferozepur

Keywords:

Post-Truth, media, Punjab Legislative Assembly Election, Hegemony, Alternative Fact, Fake News

Abstract

The Oxford Dictionaries word for 2016 is ‘post-truth’. Facts are no longer empirical entities, but a kaleidoscopic mix of anxieties, misunderstandings and myths. The term was originally coined by columnist David Roberts in 2010. It highlighted the change in politics whereby rhetoric was increasingly becoming detached from policy ideas and focusing instead on emotion. Shiv Visvanathan says, “In this collage of partly-empirical data, gossip is often mistaken for gospel”[i]. Social media has emerged as breeding ground for this phenomenon. Lies that are widely shared online within a network, whose members trust each other more than they trust any mainstream-media source, can quickly take on the appearance of truth. Post truth politics have been influential in recently concluded Legislative assembly election of Punjab. This paper tries to dig into the prospects of ‘post truth’ that manoeuvred the electoral process. Secondly, the paper uses comparative study to analyse the effects ‘post-truth politics’ and its impact in socio-political sphere.

 

[i]  “The year we reinvented the truth” , Shiv Visvanathan, The Hindu 31-12-2016

References

“The year we reinvented the truth” , Shiv Visvanathan, The Hindu 31-12-2016

Essay in the ‘The New Yorker’ titled “Truth and Politics” by Hannah Arendt.

William Butler Yeats (3 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

http://eciresults.nic.in/

Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. He is often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist.

Foucault, in Rabinow 1991

Punjab Opioid Dependence Survey (PODS), conducted by the Society for Promotion of Youth & Masses (an NGO) in collaboration with the National Drug Dependence Treatment Centre, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (Aiims), was not about all drugs, but just one type of drug — opioids.. What the PODS revealed, though, is something completely different. "Based upon the analysis of the data, around 76 percent of opioid dependent individuals in Punjab are in the age group of 18 to 35 years," the report had said.

Additional Files

Published

15-06-2017

How to Cite

Jasmeet Singh. (2017). POST-TRUTH POLITICS: A STUDY OF ELECTION TO PUNJAB LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY. International Education and Research Journal (IERJ), 3(6). Retrieved from https://ierj.in/journal/index.php/ierj/article/view/1102