We cartoonists often crib that Indian editors only encourage news-led cartoons. Despite its long history, the Indian cartoon is largely news-driven. We don’t have the kind of everyday variety US, Europe or for that matter Japan has — gag cartoons to golf cartoons, political cartoons to prison cartoons. Looks like we will soon have our own variation of the last — the jailed cartoon. No thanks to editors. Courtesy some of the highest interpreters of our constitutional democracy.

The Delhi High Court has held the publisher, editor, resident editor and cartoonist Irfan Khan of Mid Day guilty of contempt. “The Supreme Court judgments have laid down a Lakshman rekha which the publication has crossed”, the Division Bench observed. It is precisely by crossing such rekhas that this medium of visual satire has got thus far. Which many of us feel isn’t far enough.

Forget the cartoonist, people have refused to live under such poverty lines and that is why they laugh with the cartoonist at authority. If the cartoonist is tamed, the readers will smell a rat and think more evil thoughts. How do you censor the thought balloon?

Come on, the rule of law didn’t collapse even in the early days of our nascent democracy because Shankar did what he did. He and his boys at the Shankar’s Weekly did what exactly the country’s first PM asked them to do, “Don’t spare me.” Even in lesser democracies like Bangladesh, cartoonists haven’t been hauled up for secular offences.

... contd.