Institutions die in a 'democratic' Bengal

L OPINION "The key issue is democracy is based on trust, whereas dictatorship is based on terror.

- SUGATO HAZRA

If you systematically destroy trust in institutions, destroy trust in the media, in the academia, in the courts and so forth...the only thing that still can work is a dictatorship," said historian Yuval Noah Harari. Little did he know that even in a democratic system terror and erasure of trust can be effectively used as has been shown by a regional Indian political party called Trinamool Congress. The party applied these tricks within the structure of the Indian democracy without any effective road block from the national democratic institutions.

The state of West Bengal is arguably the most argumentative democracy in India. There, all issues are debated ad infinitum, in course of that often enough such issues get solved by force. Even in talk shows conducted inside TV studios. In such an atmosphere of loud display of arguments, a critical factor in democracy, one can say that the state has no respect for democracy only at the cost of one's own life and limb. The truth is a very rare and costly and precious sub kind of information, feels Yuval. The more so in the state of West Bengal. In fact the state lives in a post-truth era. Here misinformation abounds, and scientific evidence is often supplanted by alternative facts, pseudoscience, fake news, and conspiracy theories. The heinous murder of a PG-trainee doctor and the care that had gone in planting alternative facts, evidently to save the perpetrators, brought to light the extent of post-truth that has taken shape in the state.