The personal toll of political vitriol: A decade under Modi has torn apart families, friendships

After the film The Kashmir Files was released, a friend of more than 20 years fell out with me after I pointed out the movie’s factual inaccuracies and disinformation. For him, I was not just calling out the film’s propaganda but challenging his entire worldview.

Since the election of Narendra Modi in 2014, India is going through an unprecedented phase in its history in which Hindu supremacism has fused with the state. The political and social aspects of this phenomenon have been written upon extensively. Yet, the personal and psychological aspects have not been talked about enough. One cannot understand politics in its entirety without making sense of the psychological.

With the rise of the far-right, the personal has come to the fore. Because it is based, as psychology studies show, on a politics that is more emotional, less given to reason, logic, and facts, and focused on the extreme, especially hatred towards outgroups. This has led to a politics that has convulsed the personal sphere, tearing apart family and friendships. After all, toxicity in politics is bound to polarise human beings at a personal level too.

This polarisation is evident globally, especially in Europe, and in America since the Donald Trump era. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after Trump...

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