THE NEED FOR POLITICAL RESISTANCE TO THE AUTOCRACY DWELL, OBVIOUSLY, WELL BEYOND AMERICA

Arundhati  Roy, The End of Imagination (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016) (From “My Seditious Heart”: “Now it’s true that my views on these matters are at variance with those of the ruling establishment. In better days, that used to be known as a critical perspective or an alternative worldview. These days in India, it’s called sedition.” Id. at 1, 2. Note, American has not quite gone off the rails completely. Not yet! Yet . . . has not Donald Trump labeled the new media “the Enemy of the People”?  Weren’t judges who stayed his Muslim Ban (Do let’s call it what it is!) labelled “So-called judges”? Does he not believe (or, at least, does he not say he believes) that anyone who suggests  Russian interference in the 2016 election is engaged in a witch hunt designed to undermine the legitimacy of his presidency? So, America is barely holding steady on the rails with Trump as train engineer. By the way, India’s prime minister Modi, like America’s Trump, is a  ‘Twitter-lover.' And, like Trump, he is remarkably silent on Twitter when one would expect a country’s leader(s) to speak up. “In September 2015, a mob gathered outside the home of a Muslim family in Dadri, a village near Delhi, claiming that they had been eating beef (a violation of the ban on cow slaughter that had been imposed in Uttar Pradesh as well as in several other states). The family denied it. The mob refused to believe them. Mohammad Akhlaq was pulled out of his home and bludgeoned to death. . . . The meat taken from Akhlaq’s house turned out not to be beef after all. But so what?” “For days after that, the Twitter-loving prime minister said nothing. . . . “ Id. at 15. “Worship a flag? My soul is either too modern or too ancient for that. I’m not sure which. Maybe both.” Id. at 35.).