2020 · GS Paper 4 · Q2(a) · 10 marks
'Hatred is destructive of a person's wisdom and conscience that can poison a nation's spirit.' Do you agree with this view? Justify your answer.
In short
Hatred does destroy wisdom and conscience by clouding judgement and dehumanising others, and once collective it poisons a nation through prejudice, mob violence and broken fraternity. Hate broadcasts in Rwanda primed the 1994 genocide that killed about 800,000 people.
Model answer
Ghissu Editorial · Verified 4 Oct 2026 · 277 words
Clouded judgement
The Gita (2.62-63) traces the slide from anger to delusion (*sammoha*) to the ruin of reason (*buddhi-nasha*).
Silenced conscience
Hatred dehumanises its target; Nazi propaganda that cast Jews as vermin turned ordinary Germans into bystanders or accomplices of the Holocaust.
Self-destruction
Duryodhana's hatred made him refuse Krishna's plea for five villages, destroying his own clan.
Partial administration
An officer who hates a group suffers an Objectivity Deficit and cannot give equal protection under Article 14.
Words become violence
Allport (1954) showed hateful talk escalating step by step; in Rwanda in 1994, broadcasts on Radio Mille Collines primed a genocide that killed about 800,000 people.
Fractured fraternity
Partition's communal hatred in 1947 killed hundreds of thousands and uprooted about 15 million people.
Mobocracy
The Supreme Court in *Tehseen Poonawalla* (2018) condemned lynching as "horrendous acts of mobocracy".
Qualification
Indignation at injustice differs from hatred of persons, as Gandhi's "hate the sin, not the sinner" and Mandela's choice of reconciliation show.
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