You are being trained to hate half the country

Seventy-four percent of Indians told Pew Research they're satisfied with how their democracy is working. Second highest out of 23 countries, just behind Sweden. The fieldwork ran from January to April 2025.

Now think about how your last political argument went.

Both things are true at once. We like our democracy. We can't stand the people we're sharing it with.

Political scientists have a name for the second part. Affective polarisation, which is the distance between disagreeing with someone's politics and disliking them as a person. It's one of the most measured things in the field right now, and it turns up in almost every democracy anyone has bothered to check. India isn't an exception.

You know the move even if you've never named it. Someone tells you who they vote for, and in about two seconds you've decided something about how smart they are and whether they're honest. Not their argument. Them. The argument is optional now, because you already know what it's going to be and you already know it's in bad faith.

This isn't a piece about changing your vote. Vote for whoever you've got reasons to vote for, and argue for those reasons. It's about the other thing, the machine that takes a disagreement over policy and turns it into contempt for half the people you live next to. That contempt doesn't come from thinking. It gets built for you, pretty cheaply, and you're the equipment it runs on.

Both sides think they're saving the country

A BJP voter can point at real things. Roads that exist. A harder line on security. Growth numbers. A certain confidence about being Indian that wasn't there twenty years ago. You can walk up to most of that and touch it.

The mistake is assuming the other side has nothing on their list. That they're voting out of stupidity or spite. Nobody walks into a booth thinking they'd like to damage the country. Opposition voters care about a different set of things: courts that don't fold, protections for people who can't protect themselves, welfare that reaches the bottom, states that can push back on Delhi.

You're allowed to think they've got the weights wrong. That's a real argument and it's worth having properly. But it's a completely different claim from saying they want the country to fail. Most political anger in this country comes from quietly treating those two as the same sentence. And once you've done that, there's nothing left to say to each other.

When your party becomes your team

Think about how people talk after their cricket team loses. The umpire was blind. The pitch was doctored. One bad match means nothing, but the win last month proved everything. Nobody applies that standard to a team they don't support, and nobody notices they're doing it.

Politics runs on the same machinery. Our brains were built for small groups, back when knowing who was on your side kept you alive. Parties plug into that wiring without much effort.

The moment a political preference stops being a position and becomes an identity, the scoring changes. Your side's wins prove they're good at this. Your side's failures were bad luck, or someone else's fault, or a fair attempt that didn't land. Their side's wins were flukes or PR. Their side's failures show you what they really are. Your extremists are a few idiots who don't represent anyone. Their extremists are the mask coming off.

Nobody sits down and decides to do this. It just runs.

Here's a quick test. Name the last policy your own side got wrong. If it doesn't come to you in ten seconds, you're not judging a party. You're supporting a team, and the ten seconds is the whole result.

Outrage pays the bills

The average opposition voter is boring. They've got an EMI, a view on petrol prices, and a mild worry about what happens to farm income. You will never see this person, because a headline about a Congress voter raising a reasonable concern over agricultural procurement earns nobody anything.

But the single most unhinged sentence spoken by an opposition worker in a country of 1.4 billion people will reach you inside an hour. Cut to nine seconds. With a caption telling you how to feel about it.

News channels and ad-funded platforms and campaign war rooms are not neutral pipes. They're tuned for engagement, and nothing on earth engages like hostility.

So nobody is comparing their side's average to the other side's average. They're comparing their side's best to the other side's worst, and then deciding, quite reasonably given what they were shown, that the anger is earned.

A CSDS-Lokniti survey found that one in six Indian WhatsApp users was in a group run by a party or a leader. That was 2017. Nobody has to guess what nine more years did to that number, though as far as I can tell nobody has measured it properly either, which is its own kind of answer.

The parts both sides get right

Drop the team framing for a minute and something uncomfortable happens. Some criticisms stop being attacks and start being just true, no matter who's saying them.

Corruption at the bottom hasn't gone anywhere. Whatever's changed at the top, the ordinary person's day at the tehsil office or the registration counter or the hospital desk is still a transaction. Anyone who's dealt with these places knows it. Backing a party has never required pretending otherwise, and honestly the fix is worth a lot more than the defence.

Nepotism is still a big problem, and not only where it's convenient to point. Dynastic politics is a fair and heavy charge against the Congress. It's also sitting there in state units and alliance partners and who gets a ticket, including inside the party that campaigns against it. If it's a principle it applies everywhere. If it only applies to the other lot, it was never a principle. It was a stick.

Being able to say both of those out loud, without feeling like you've betrayed anybody, is the actual test of whether someone holds a position or belongs to a team. Most people fail it. That's not a moral failing, it's just what the wiring does when nobody interrupts it.

Why so many techies lean one way

Spend any time in Indian IT circles or around founders and the tilt is obvious. It isn't mysterious and it isn't sinister.

That part of the economy responds to things you can see compounding. Payment rails. Registration and compliance getting less painful. Airports and roads. Macro policy that doesn't lurch. A government that talks about growth in words the room already uses. Those wins show up in your working week and on a balance sheet, and they land on people who are placed to collect them.

The stuff the other side keeps going on about is mostly insurance. Courts that hold, a floor nobody falls through. Insurance is invisible while it's working. You find out about it the day you need it, and someone doing well in a metro is unlikely to ever need it the way a landless labourer or a shopkeeper from the wrong community might.

So it's not that one group thinks clearly and the other one feels. Everyone's standing somewhere that makes one set of benefits easy to see and one set of risks easy to miss. Every political position is a spot you're standing in, and the people surest about theirs are usually the ones who've never had to stand anywhere else.

The loudest people are also the dumbest

Plainly, because the polite version of this is useless.

Every camp has a chunk of low IQ, high volume supporters. Maximum certainty, minimum information. And they are, without exception, the loudest people in the room. They run the replies and the WhatsApp groups and the comment sections and half the TV panels, because confidence scales much faster than competence. People who actually understand a policy are busy and full of caveats. People who understand nothing are free all day.

The problem isn't just that the internet is unpleasant. It's that these are the people who end up standing in for "the other side" inside your head, because they're the only ones with their hand up. Nobody's picture of a Congress voter is built from the Congress voters they actually know. It's built from the worst three they've seen shouting on a screen.

And it runs both ways. Someone out there has assembled their entire idea of a BJP supporter from the loudest, stupidest person on that side. From where they're standing, that guess looks about as fair as yours did.

Judging a camp by its noisiest five percent is like judging a city by its traffic.

One case, two countries

Take something genuinely contested. Umar Khalid, in the Delhi riots larger conspiracy case, is the obvious one.

The facts aren't really in dispute. He's been in custody under the UAPA since September 2020, which is more than five years, and the trial hasn't finished. On 5 January 2026 the Supreme Court refused him bail, holding that the statutory bar under Section 43D(5) of the UAPA applied to him and to Sharjeel Imam. The same bench ordered five co-accused in the same case released on conditions. In May the Delhi High Court let him out from 1 to 3 June on a one lakh personal bond so he could be there for his mother's surgery. He'd asked for fifteen days. The court said no to most of it.

Now watch what those identical facts do to different people.

One reading: this is a serious conspiracy case, the courts have gone through the material more than once, the bench separated him from his co-accused on the record, and judges who were willing to release five other people were not willing to release him. That has to mean something.

The other reading: five years inside without a verdict is punishment by process, the UAPA's bail bar makes the presumption of innocence more or less unavailable, and whatever you think of the case, "you may leave prison for seventy-two hours because your mother is being operated on" is not what a working system looks like.

Both of those come out of the same court orders. Neither one needs anybody to be lying.

The mechanism is the same one from earlier. Benefit of the doubt gets handed out along tribal lines. If someone reads as one of ours, the doubt goes their way. If they read as one of theirs, the exact same doubt goes against them. That's why the country splits so cleanly here. Not because half of us read the chargesheet and half didn't. Almost nobody on either side is reasoning from the case file at all. We're working backwards from whichever answer is more comfortable to hold.

I'm not going to tell you the right verdict, and neither should anyone else arguing about it online, because none of us have what the judges have. But it makes a clean mirror. Notice which way your gut went before you got to any of the details above. Then ask whether it would have gone the same way if the man in that cell had been one of yours.

What actually helps

None of this is a request to soften your politics. It's about not paying for them with your day.

• Separate voters from politicians. Politicians are playing a professional game for power and they should be judged hard for it. Your colleague isn't in that game. He's a person trying to do right by his family with whatever information reaches his phone.
• Assume the filter bubble is working on you, not on them. Your feed is built to make you feel correct and make the other lot look ridiculous. It's very good at its job and you're not paying for it in money.
• Ask what the best version of their argument is. If you can't say it in a way a sharp opponent would accept as fair, you haven't beaten it. You've beaten one you built yourself.

That last one is harder than it sounds and it's the only one that's ever changed my mind about anything.

What breaks the cycle is realising the person across from you holds their certainty exactly as hard as you hold yours, for reasons that make just as much sense from where they're standing. Doesn't make them right. Makes them a citizen instead of an enemy, which is a much lower bar than agreement, and it turns out to be enough to be going on with.

Jai Hind.