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Like God, the censor can work in mysterious ways. On Monday, February 9, this happened: when one clicked to open The Wire’s Instagram account, you were greeted by a message that read: ‘Account not available in India’. This was followed by the explanation “…because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content.”

The questions were innumerable but two of them bleeped like a siren in the dark: First, what was the content that had attracted the move to block 1.3 million users from accessing The Wire’s Instagram handle? Second, who had ordered this action? Turns out that the object of this extraordinarily overbroad crackdown was a cartoon video, spanning a mere 52 seconds. Which brings us to the second question: the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting insisted it was not behind the move and that was puzzling. It was learnt later that a government authority had contacted Meta, which owns Instagram, to block the satirical video. 

In its eagerness to comply, Meta ended up mistakenly removing the entire Instagram handle! A couple of hours later the account came back but not the video deemed as offensive.

This whole business reveals a great deal about the opaque and chaotic nature of censorship in India. Some bureaucrat, driven either by personal over-zealousness or at the prompting of one of the many government authorities granted the power to expurgate online content, set this train of action into motion with very little accountability or direct exposure to public wrath. 

According to the rulebook, any move to censor would have to be preceded by a notice about it reaching the affected platform. In this case, The Wire received no prior intimation. It was only on February 11, when it was given the opportunity to present its defence to an inter-departmental committee (IDC), that it was orally informed that the grounds for blocking the cartoon video were that it had spread rumours/unverified information that would affect the defence, security, reputation of the country and India’s relations with foreign countries.

The term “relations with foreign countries” is a useful one for government censors, because it is listed in Article 19 (2) which restricts the guarantee of freedom of speech and expression inherent in Article 19 1 (a). But could The Wire cartoon video really have had those malign impacts outlined by the government? 

Let’s revisit the said cartoon video. The first aspect about it that strikes the most casual viewer is that its treatment is minimalist. It is not particularly sophisticated in its use of tech; neither is it overly funny, certainly not rolling-on-the-floor funny. Also, it does not seek to subject the country to derision in any way or create ill-will with neighbouring countries. It is focused on a real-life development: the prime minister’s flight from parliament during the recent budget session when faced by the opposition on his handling of the 2020 confrontation between Indian and Chinese forces in Galwan and his empty instruction to the army, in the face of the Chinese military buildup, to do what it thinks best: ‘Jo uchit samjho’.

That this slight cultural artefact was enough to trigger the all-powerful ruling establishment speaks volumes for its hypersensitivity over the prime minister’s image and the extent to which it is prepared to go in order to repulse even the mildest criticism of that individual. Every development of this kind shrinks the space for dissent and satire in the country, while simultaneously expanding the state’s appetite to quell media speech. 

Many readers who posted comments on this made the point that in the UPA years, then prime minister Manmohan Singh was heavily lampooned for his alleged “weakness”, with very little consequences to media freedoms. Today even a humour-laden suggestion that the present incumbent in the prime ministerial chair is partial to flight in the face of a political challenge, is framed as an attack on the sovereignty of the........

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