Journal of Contemporary Politics
Year: 2026, Volume: 5, Issue: 1, Pages: 56-65
Original Article
Salvin Paul1*
1School of Legal and Socio-Political Studies, Dr B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi, Delhi, India
*Corresponding Author
Email: [email protected]
Received Date:09 December 2025, Accepted Date:08 February 2026, Published Date:31 March 2026
The global rise of post-truth politics characterised by weakened shared factual baselines and the dominance of emotionally charged, identity-driven narratives has reshaped democratic communication in profound ways. While often associated with populist regimes or fragile institutional contexts, India demonstrates that post-truth dynamics can take distinctive forms within robust yet polarised federal democracies. This article argues that Kerala, long celebrated for its literacy, welfare achievements, and progressive political culture, exhibits a unique model of soft post-truth politics that operates not through authoritarian controls or systematic fabrication but through subtler practices of narrative management, symbolic governance, and dense party–society embeddedness. Drawing on global theoretical work, Indian studies on misinformation and media capture, and Kerala-specific scholarship, the article analyses the state’s informational landscape between 2015 and 2025 through core cases such as the Sabarimala misinformation wave, cyber-harassment of journalists, contested narratives surrounding the COVID-19 “Kerala model,” and the Solar Scam’s narrative afterlife, which is repeatedly mobilised as political ammunition despite contested factual clarity. It also examines appeasement discourses involving Muslim, Christian, and Eezhava communities, which illuminate how identity-based framings shape public perception. Together, these cases demonstrate that Kerala’s post-truth politics constitutes a hybrid formation where welfare legitimacy coexists with selective transparency, ideological flexibility, and competing truth regimes within a densely mediated democracy.
Keywords: Post-truth politics; Misinformation; India; Kerala; Political communication; symbolic politics; Media; Cyber-harassment; Narrative control
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© 2026 Published by Bangalore University. This is an open-access article under the CC BY license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
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