One of the first text messages I received, minutes after Donald Trump was elected America’s 45th president, was from my Indian friend Gulrez in Los Angeles. In May 2014, when the self-styled Hindu nationalist politician Narendra Modi was elected India’s prime minister, Gulrez lived a few blocks away from me in Juhapura, a Muslim ghetto in the state of Gujarat, India.
“It’s déjà vu,” he wrote to me on Tuesday, November 8.
Trump’s win feels like 2014 all over again: another country I love and have family roots in has elected a candidate whose ascension to power was built, in part, on wishing that Muslims like Gulrez and I would no longer exist.
