A peer-reviewed paper, published in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, has revealed that the Congress party was the farthest from scientific understanding, while the BJP was closest to scientific understanding in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The paper is titled ‘Politicization and Polarization Concerning Science in Global South: Evidence from News Coverage of COVID-19 in India.‘ The authors analysed more than 2 lakh articles that were published by 6 Indian English newspapers between January 2020 and April 2022.
These newspapers included the Times of India, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, The Indian Express, The Telegraph, and India Today Online (collected from Lexis Nexis).
Who were politicizing and polarizing the public space on the wake of COVID-19 pandemic in India?
— Kausik Gangopadhyay (@kausikgy) March 25, 2025
On this question, I have published a peer-reviewed paper in International Journal of Public Opinion Research [1] from Oxford with my coauthors.
We have gathered data from more than… pic.twitter.com/euwDjEs2Q4
The paper studied news articles published in India during the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic (3 different waves) to measure the extent of politicisation of news coverage and polarisation between the BJP and the Congress.
It noted, “We have found a significant level of politicization in the news coverage of COVID-19 vaccine, lockdown, and overall COVID-19 issues. The language difference—the measure of polarization—between the two major national political parties of India, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress (Congress), on COVID-19 maintains a consistent difference, with an increasing trend during election seasons and a decreasing trend during the peak of COVID-19 waves.”
“On the COVID-19 vaccine issue, the trend is similar, but on the COVID-19 lockdown issue, the degree of polarization has diminished with time. Overall, the politicization and polarization trends in India, resemble a non-uniform pattern, which may be attributed to the perceived shocks in the political competition environment through different state assembly elections,” the paper added.
The interpretation of the results reveals larger politicisation of the COVID-19 vaccine between March 2021 and April 2022. OpIndia had reported at that time how the Congress party was peddling propaganda against Indian vaccine makers.
“We can see a U-shaped trend in the language difference between BJP and Congress during February 2021 to August 2021. Interestingly, the vaccination started in India in January 2021 for the health and frontline workers and was subsequently rolled out for the general public in phases since March 2021. During the height of the second wave of COVID-19 in India, polarization had come down but again
increased after the end of the second wave,” the paper stated.
Polarisation (defined as differing positions taken by various political actors on any issue) is being measured on the basis of language differences.
As evident from the image below, the language difference between the BJP and the Congress was found to be high during the announcement of the lockdown in March 2020 (thereby indicating increased polarisation).
“The language difference between BJP and Congress remained stable during the initial period of the pandemic but peaked in September 2020 on the eve of the Bihar assembly election,” the paper added.
“On the COVID-19 vaccine issue, the language difference between BJP and Congress has been fluctuating but generally at a higher level of difference compared to the earlier issues,” it pointed out.
As per the research paper, the polarisation at the micro level increases if political discourse on handling the COVID-19 crisis diverges.
“The overall COVID- 19 coverage is significantly politicized before the roll-out of vaccine for all, which coincided with the end of the second wave of COVID-19. COVID-19 news coverage was significantly polarized between the two prime political blocs of BJP and Congress. Politicization and polarization of science in the Global South seem to be motivated by competition in the political environment as is the case with the democracies in Global North,” the paper concluded.
Observations made by author Kausik Gangopadhyay
Kausik Gangopadhyay, one of the authors of the peer-reviewed paper, is an economist and a Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode.
In a tweet on Tuesday (25th March), he observed, “Congress was the party farthest from the scientific understanding and BJP closest to the scientific understanding. All other parties were in between.”
“This is understandable in the sense that the party in power needs to embrace reality to make things work, and the party in opposition simply opposes the party in power,” Kausik Gangopadhyay added.
He, however, made it clear that it was his observation and not that of the two other authors of the paper Swarn Rajan and Anirban Ghatak.
