Saturday, June 15, 2024

Deja Vu

 Nearly five years ago I posted some thoughts about Arundhati Roy's fiction and political writing that have often brought her threats for her courageous stance against despotism in her country.  Now, as reported in The Guardian, she is again under siege:

Indian authorities have granted permission for the prosecution of the Booker prize-winning Indian novelist Arundhati Roy over comments she made about Kashmir at an event in 2010.

After watching that online presentation by Roy and Naomi Klein on  the web site of "The Nation" I wrote that:

Americans don't pay a lot of attention to what is going on in India,  but we make that choice at our own peril.  It is a country of over a billion people ruled by an authoritarian regime which operates comfortably in the neo-liberal global economy.  One result of that is that India is far along the path to the environmental disaster brought to us by a combination of global warming and continuing bad economic and political choices.

The comparison of political trends in India and the U.S. seems to me even more apt now given Trump's plan to harness the Justice Department to go after his critics should he win the election in 2024.

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