A fear of laughter seems to have overtaken the ruling regime. Access to a short cartoon video featuring the prime minister, Narendra Modi, on the social media handles of The Wire was recently blocked. The objections were not written out and reviewed by a committee, as the Supreme Court had mentioned in an earlier case. Orally given, the reasons were that the cartoon spread rumours that would affect the security, defence, and reputation of the country and India’s relations with foreign countries. But cartoons, satire, comedy and humour are part of a thriving democracy. Laughter evoked by exaggeration through which absurdities and failings are shown up contributes to cohesion and the understanding of proportion. They are the marks of a civilised society. Muffling laughter by using power and weaponising laws, as the Union government and Bharatiya Janata Party-led state governments are doing, exposes insecurity and a refusal, as the Editors Guild of India pointed out, to be commented on or scrutinised, which is a rising trend. Last year, the Madras High Court, in an interim order, asked the Union information and broadcasting ministry to allow public access to a website after it had taken down a cartoon that showed the prime minister in chains while meeting the president of the United States of America.
This quickness to block access and coerce removals of satirical or comic material featuring representatives of the government is a frank suppression of the right to free expression, the right to think, to create, and the freedom to laugh. Power thrives on humourless compliance; a democracy flourishes amid a profusion of attitudes. Political satire is an integral part of an intelligent, aware, participatory community. Some Indian high courts, and especially the Supreme Court, have in their judgments upheld the art of ridiculing through exaggeration and, indirectly, the right to laugh. In March 2025, the Supreme Court had said that the fundamentals of a 75-year-old democracy are not so shaky that the mere recital of a poem or any form of entertainment, such as stand-up comedy, could be alleged to lead to animosity or hatred among different communities. Yet blocking access to online material by weaponising laws is becoming quite frequent. A YouTube channel run by the editor of a digital news platform, for example, has been recently blocked on grounds of national security and public order.
But repeated blocking may not have killed the joke. While the India AI Impact Summit progressed swimmingly, the Congress said that in six weeks, nine videos clearly shown to have been generated by Artificial Intelligence on the Congress’s social media handles had been deleted on the orders of government bodies. Apparently, even AI is not allowed to produce material critical or satirical of the government or the prime minister although Mr Modi is going all out to make India an AI hub. Silencing AI while welcoming it is not just irony; it is comedy.