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

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.