Ananya Chakravarti

7/ The real purpose, whether they were fully aware of it or not, was to ensure that (English-medium) national institutions, especially the Supreme Court, would continue to adjudicate and govern based on FACT. This is the real battle that we lost.

9/ The court's equation of evidence-based history with opinion was aided by the same process playing out here: the increasingly monopolistic structure of corporate media, journalistic norms of fallacious "balance," the fragmentation of information markets also happened in India

10/ The same erosion of faith in expertise, fueled by political failure with impunity, has led to a basic distrust of science and academic knowledge that I see playing out here.

13/ Trump has set a horrific precedent in the US, the endpoint of which looks like India today: the state has equated evidence-based knowledge with political opinion AND it has made it possible to make policy on the basis of the latter.

14/ This is the real danger that US academics must fight tooth and nail. Learned op-eds are not going to stem the tide of public opinion in the current structure of media markets. Like social media outreach, producing them is important but they can only achieve so much.