Elon Musk has a habit of dropping cryptic emojis and letting the internet do the rest. On October 2, one such gesture — a “🤔” in reply to a post claiming that “there is no such thing as colonisation” — set off a storm in India. The post argued that if Indians in England became English, then Englishmen in India became Indian, and therefore the British never actually ruled India. For many Indians, Musk’s response was not innocent curiosity but amplification of a dangerous distortion. To understand the backlash, you have to understand not just the history of colonial rule, but also how those memories are kept alive in public consciousness. The argument Musk responded to presents colonisation as mere migration, erasing the defining feature of empire — power. Immigration implies

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