Now look into my eyes and listen to me. I know you’re a fine liberal, a wonderful “forwarder” and “sharer” of signature campaigns for free speech and expression in this country over email, facebook, Twitter and carrier pigeon. You’ve felt aghast when politically-motivated goons raged against MF Husain’s paintings in the past. You even read out passages from Salman Rushdie’s haraam book, the pdf of which you downloaded (free) from the internet, when you heard that he was being shooed away from attending the Jaipur Literature Festival in January this year because Uttar Pradesh was going to the polls.

Going by your demeanour, I can also make out that you’re piqued, no pissed off, by the latest episode of freelance cartoonist Aseem Trivedi being carted away by the cops and kept in police detention for three days on the charge of sedition and under the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971. You’re hoping that along with you and many other liberals, more recognizable and respected faces will come out of their santoor-infused woodwork and protest against such muzzling of free expression.

Well, don’t hold your breath. And certainly don’t keep holding your breath every time someone gets knocked about for depicting or coming up with something that offends a patriot or a member of a community or a flunkey of an important person either in industry (Bollywood included) or in politics (religions included). Because, sweetheart, an effective outcry against thin-skinnedness in this country is not going to happen. All you’ll know is that you and those “like-minded” are raging liberals.

Let’s take Trivedi’s cartoon.

It replaces the three lions – well, four, but the poor chap at the back is never seen so let’s knock him out – that form the capital on top of the pillar found in Sarnath (in modern Akhilesh Yadavland) and built during Emperor Asoka’s era around 250 BC, with three wolves, the preferred anthropomorphic depiction of rapists for some reason.

I am taking a wild guess that Trivedi may have been influenced in his portrayal of the wolves by the Warner Bros cartoon creation of Wile E Coyote by cartoonist, Chuck Jones. But going by the drops of blood dripping from two of the three wolves’ lolling tongues in the fang-club, Trivedi’s source could very well be any of the far-less cute depictions of wolves in the story of Little Red Riding Hood

Yes, these may seem pointless digressions to you, lover of free-but-reasoned expression, but these are digressions that seem to matter these days. Cathartic bubble-pricking digressions such as a cartoon depicting the national symbol of the Asoka pillar changed into a symbol of bloodthirsty State oppression and sinister violence.

And it’s not Big Brother government or über-patriotic rightwingers who howled at the moon on coming across Trivedi’s cartoon. It was someone like you and me. Well, by that I mean a fellow citizen by the name of Amit Katarnavre, a law student from Navi Mumbai. It was Katarnavre – and not Bal Thackeray or Kapil Sibal or the other usual suspects – who filed a complaint which the police then duly followed up. If there’s a law that cracks down on “sedition” – a very handy tool with the colonial British India authorities to keep a leash on any attack or vehement critique of another country, Britain – it can be used, right? I mean if sedition was such an anachronism, and a perverted anachronism used against one’s own citizens at that, surely it would have been rubbed off the blackboard. After all, no one uses a lota if they prefer using the flush.

Which is where the truth lies, my liberal munchkin. It’s not the State that takes any extra relish in banning things left, right and centre in this country or wagging the finger at an “offensive” person just for the heck of it. Rushdie’s haraam book was put on the list of prohibited items for import only after there was a demand for it from some voters who saw The Satanic Verses as a poke in the eye of their prophet (PBUH).

In general, India’s case is very different from the cuckoo-land of West Bengal where the post-Red Queen that is Mamata Banerjee has been going on an “Off with his head!” spree whether it’s a cartoon targeting her or a non-genuflecting question or a passing comment that her poetry and paintings suck big time. In the rest of India, governments have more lucrative things to do.

In the Republic of India, it’s the aam admi – or variations of him – who are the ones perturbed at things they don’t believe to serve any other purpose than that of an attack-dog or a nasty shocker. And let’s face it, as the chief political cartoonist of The Indian Express EP Unny expressed without beating about the bush, a cartoon – at least, a political or social cartoon as opposed to Chacha Choudhury or Spongebob Squarepants – is an attack dog. Rivers flow, fire burns, cartoons attack. That’s the nature of the three-headed (forget the fourth, will you?) beast.

What governments and political parties and community groups do is to line up to fill their tanks with the deep resentment felt by ordinary people armed with an extremely low threshold for withstanding criticism and ridicule. Cartoon history is very different from contemporary cartooning. The number of people who complain about some governor not setting the national flag properly at some function, whining about some wine-serving restaurant in Australia called “Ghandi”, frothing about some sportsman seen to not lip-synch along with the national anthem, or plain screaming about some film showing a statuette of Buddha on the mantelpiece near the drinks cabinet is quite staggering.

Tastes and methods of sending out jibes change with time. While more or less everyone is able to appreciate the rapier wit of, say, satirical cartoons by Gaganendranath Thakur, the early depictions of “Urdu Punch” cartoons, and even those of RK Laxman, Mopanna, OV Vijayan and Kutty, many contemporary cartoonists choose a rawer, more damning, more offensive visual-textual language more understandable in our times. Let’s just say showing Manmohan Singh wearing a dunce cap won’t cut much ice. Or ire.

But even you, member of the liberati, do end up many times mumbling -especially if it’s a cartoon lambasting some “minority delusion” – about things going “too far”. You mutter the need for “good taste”, for some kind of “self-censorship” – as if self-censorship was some kind of sexual experiment-test prepared by the Mahatma or semen-retaining Naga sadhus. The liberal media also does it galore, with a frown and a mumble, of course.  Because which media doesn’t want to retain its “liberal” tag and wants to keep a mob at bay in a country or city where governments and authorities always take the side of the self-styled offended rather than even making sounds about protecting the “offender”.

There will be endless debate about the freedom of expression in India over the aeons. Many heads will talk for and against the Indian flag being worn as a chaddi. Fine op-ed pieces will talk about how we need to be a liberal democracy while not hurting anybody’s sentiments.

I say forget that bakwaas. It’s so much easier to just cut through the chase and ban political cartoons in India. Political, social, sexual cartoons – just put a lid on them. Frankly, I don’t think anyone – not even you, lover of New Yorker cartoons depicting Facebook law-breaking nipples – will notice when they’re gone.

Image source – [http://www.flickr.com/photos/ikayama/117848873/]