I
f lampooning was a threat to national security, defence, reputation and India’s foreign relations, the first Prime Minister of the country, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru would have desisted from telling cartoonist K. Shankar Pillai — “Don’t spare me, Shankar”.
Recently, access to a 52-second cartoon video reportedly featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi was blocked from the social media handles of The Wire, an online news portal. The portal reported that one of its editors was “informed orally.... that the grounds for blocking the cartoon were that it spread rumours/unverified information that would affect the defence, security, reputation of the country and India’s relations with foreign countries”.
The Editors Guild of India issued a statement that the incident was yet “another example of the rising intolerance to comment and scrutiny on the part of the government and its representatives… and serves to tarnish India’s credentials as an accommodative democracy that gives space to media, including satire and humour”.
Legal precedents
