Four years ago, on a random journey, I ended up chatting with a middle-aged woman sitting near me. We somehow got talking about Indian politics. What she said that day still haunts me.
She asked me to look closely at the timing of tragedies—like the Pulwama attack—and how they magically align with elections. Then, she made a quiet prediction: “Watch, something will happen again before the voting starts.”
Two days later, I was back home scrolling through Twitter. My heart sank. News of the Poonch attack was everywhere. I was in absolute shock. I never posted about it online, but I whispered to my friends, asking how she could have possibly known.
Since that day, every time an election nears, that conversation creeps back into my mind. It makes me genuinely afraid. India is a beautiful, chaotic mix of languages, religions, and cultures. We grew up living in a shared brotherhood. But today, it often feels like political leaders engineer hatred just to stay in power. They spin a narrative where a vast majority is somehow terrified of a small minority. How is that even logically possible?
But that is the reality of the political system. Whoever controls the narrative—whoever plants the idea in your head—holds the power. If they sell fear, they buy votes. The question isn’t just whether these political narratives are true. The real question is why we let them divide us so easily.