# The Truth Under Siege: How Conspiracy Theories Are Poisoning Democracy It begins with tragedy—a woman vanishes without a trace, a teenage boy attacks children at a dance class, a politician is brutally murdered in the sanctuary of her own home. The first hours of public response are natural, human, even mundane: people share dates, times, and places, trying to process the shock of what has happened. Collective grief and confusion find outlets in neighbourhood Facebook groups and X posts. But something shifts almost immediately. Within hours, the factual discussions dissolve into something darker and more sinister. Wild theories spread…

Imagine the quiet concentration of an examination hall: rows of students bent over their desks, pens moving, minds working through a timed paper, the soft rustle of pages the only disturbance. For thousands of Class 9 students across Bihar, that atmosphere was part of the Social Science half-yearly examination held on September 22. It was a normal exam, or at least it should have been. But within hours, what happened outside the examination hall threatened to overshadow the work done inside it. A photograph began circulating on social media, supposedly showing a page from the very question paper that students…