Donald Trump Presidency dominates discourse at JLF

The portentous clouds of a Trump presidency hung heavy over an acrimonious closing session of the Jaipur Literature Festival here, where experts questioned whether facts still held any validity in a "post-truth" world.
The session, featuring the likes of Shashi Tharoor, Luke Harding, Swapan Dasgupta, Ashutosh Varshney, Anne Waldman, and Prasoon Joshi and others, was a TV-style debate marked by verbal volleys where volume took precedence over clarity, ending ultimately on an unresolved note.
Recurring themes were topics like social media's role in propagating falsehood, the polarisation of people along multiple lines, and mostly, the election victory of new US President Donald Trump, who not only dominated the concluding session but was a topic of discussion by eminent writers like Paul Beatty, Richard Flanagan and others during the festival.

In a world such as this, social media has become a platform for propagation of falsehoods and hatred, the panelists opined.
Tharoor argued that people choose to focus on a particular interpretation of facts, creating their own bias.
"We have always lived in a world of lies. Seduced by social media, people believe in things as truth which is not true. Truth is you are entitled to your opinions. You are not entitled to facts. We are living in a world where it is easy to tell lies and control them," Tharoor said.

He went on to say democratic politics was "contagious" and power often "manipulates" the truth.

An individual's ideological bias is reflected in the facts that he/she chooses to focus on, particularly on social media, which he said, "propagates fascist ideas".
According to the Congress MP, only a "version" of truth is allowed by the majority. He said, "In a democracy, the majority allow a version of truth to prevail. It is a world where truth is contested and truth multiplies, but not a post-truth world."
Meanwhile, Waldman called the term 'post-truth' "patriarchal", saying that social media has influenced people's judgement of the truth.
Saying that "a new breed of authoritarian leaders like
Putin" had come up for whom, "truth is irrelevant", Luke Harding asserted that that facts were "sacred even in this age" and urged people to keep up the "fight".

Singing the same tune was Parsoon Joshi, who said, "beliefs and emotions" had become bigger, and that "lies are the bedrock of politics and propaganda."
"The problem is lies are positioned as facts," Joshi said.
Varshney charted out the pros and cons of social media.
"Social media is a double edged sword. It gives space to people who channel truth, but gives us power to fight it also. To assume that demonetisation is a move to take money from the rich and give it to the poor is a falsehood.
"We have been living in a post-truth world, but the word has entered the Oxford dictionary only recently. Its idea is not new, but the form is. Earlier truth was not about democratic politics, it was about capitalism," he said.

Swapan Dasguta opined that people have been "manipulated" on an international level by "losers" of the world, who have "chained" together.
"Losers of the world chain together and tell us we live in a post-truth world. We have all been manipulated. Some people who thought they had a monopoly on truth were out of sync with public opinion," Dasgupta said.