Bullies in the house

Bullying is a pandemic, and a certain kind of male has risen to power through it. But we have a cure

- Bijoy Venugopal

WHAT’S COMMON to clown, dummy, phony, dopey, weird, pathetic, and low-class slob? Nope, they’re not Snow White’s seven dwarfs. They’re labels that the current Leader Of The Free World has used to bad-mouth his detractors on Twitter.

By the time you read this, the free-willed citizens of the US would have hopefully slammed their doors in the face of the nastiest bully to occupy the Oval Office in recent memory. But whether Shri Doland stays or goes, the legacy that his ilk has spawned and legitimised will be harder to root out.

Bullying is a pandemic. Like the other one we are fighting, it must be addressed with equal urgency. Look around for the symptoms — increasing authoritarianism, muzzling of dissent, concentration of power, police brutality, cronyism, repression of free speech, labelling, dog-whistling, tampering with institutions, excessive profiling, surveillance — and you can see a pattern of how bully-states operate.

If four more years of Trump are bad for the US, closer home we are staring down the barrel at a lifetime of being victimised. Look how leaders of most BRICs nations have exploited electoral systems to inveigle themselves into positions of incontestable authority: China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin have sworn themselves in for life, Brazil’s Bolsonaro thrives on brazen autocracy, and the story in India is all too familiar.