Dear Express reader, As the week ended, protesting farmers in Karnal clashed with the police, a reminder of a people’s agitation that continues, even though it seems far away from the arc lights now, Haryana picking up the baton from Punjab. The Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi announced its plan to take out a Tiranga Yatra in Ayodhya next month, in its continuing effort to claim the nationalism plank, prise it loose from the BJP’s grip. And Prime Minister Narendra Modi drew a line between the still unfolding situation in Afghanistan, after the Taliban take-over, with India's amended citizenship law that eases the road to citizenship for religious groups from neighbouring countries, except Muslims. Three stories, featuring the People, the Opposition, and the Government. And sharing the newspage with these three reports, a wise judge, who spoke of democracy’s truth, or truths. Delivering the Sixth Chief Justice MC Chagla Memorial Online Lecture, Justice DY Chandrachud said that “democracy needs the power of truth to survive”. He then went on to problematise the nature of truth, and lay out the difficulties of arriving at one truth. He spoke of the necessity, at the same time, to scrutinise the “truth providers” and to keep trying to reach a shared understanding of what truth means, lest it be hijacked by the powerful and the state. The farmers who have been speaking their truth to power for over a year now, even as the Centre increasingly turns a deaf ear; the AAP challenging the BJP with “true” deshbhakti, as it strives to spread from Delhi to other parts of the country; and the PM using the crisis in Afghanistan to re-state his government's truth, of the boundedness of a nation's compassion — read alongside Justice Chandrachud’s thought-provoking lecture, they raise a question, or questions. How many truths can a large and diverse nation carry? How does it reconcile them when they are contradictory and conflicting? What must be the mechanisms, and terms, of such reconciliation? What can be done to level the playing field, how must the rules be changed, so that everyone can play the truth game, and have a chance at shaping the final outcome? Because, for all its elusiveness and indeterminateness, and despite the fact that it can often become a rigged game, the search for a common truth must continue. Because only that can help us break out of bubbles and echo chambers, sidestep falsehood and fake news. And because only that can lead to, to quote Justice Chandrachud again, “public trust” and a shared “public memory”, without which democracy will find it hard to survive. Justice Chandrachud’s lecture urges us to take a step back from the heat of political battles. His words prod us to reflect on what we are doing, where we are going, even as the world around us changes, bringing new technologies that make possible more ways of seeing, even as they darken old blind spots and create new ones. Whatever be the next steps for the farmers’ movement, and for the Aam Aadmi Party and the Modi government at the Centre as important state elections draw closer, including in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, and no matter where our own political sympathies lie, a commitment to a fair process of reaching the truth will, at the very least, bring much-needed tolerance and humility to self-righteous actors and a hardening process. Till next week, Vandita | 
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