What a post 9/11 short story tells us about the Mahmudabad arrest and law’s chilling effect in liberal academia
Laila Lalami’s haunting short story Echo (2011), part of a post 9/11 literary collection, follows an Arab academic in the US hounded for her critique of the ‘War on Terror’. Lalami’s U.S. and Modi’s India present a common blue print for chilling speech in liberal academic spaces, and the law’s enabling role in it.
Samaira Singh is a law student at Jindal Global Law School. Her primary interests lie in the domains of literature, particularly historical fiction, and the intersection between law and policy-making.