Following the shocking arrest of the comedian Kiku Sharda for imitating self-proclaimed Sikh godman, Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, we decided to find out how tolerant the world’s populace and states are when it comes to humour. We began by researching from the year 2000 onwards to see how many works of satire have had to face the wrath of either the state or the mob. As the numbers turned out to be far more alarming than we had imagined, we decided to take 2012 as the starting point. We dug deep and found many instances. However, here we have included 27 cases – the ones we thought were the most outrageous. The list has representations from the continent of Asia, Africa, Europe and North America, but isn’t exhaustive by any means.

From the list of 27, we have further shortlisted eight incidents that we thought needed to discussed in details, owing to the alarming state of affairs they points towards.

Finally, there is also an analysis of the data.

All India Bakchod

The All India Bakchod (Knockout), Roast was released as a webisode on YouTube on 28 January, 2015. Ranveer Singh and Arjun Kapoor were the roast, while Karan Johar was the roast-master. Any guesses on who took enough offence to complain with the chief metropolitan magistrate of Gurgaon court, labelling it as “pornographic” in nature? A “social activist” by the name of Santosh Daundkar. The court obliged and ordered a First Information Report (FIR) to be lodged. The backlash of the conservative bandwagon and pressure from the police made AIB take the video off YouTube with a public note on February 3, 2015.

PK

PK was released on 19 December, 2014. It was a satire on the three major religions in the Indian subcontinent: Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. It also showed the possibility of Indians and Pakistanis living together in harmony. It doesn’t have to be a potential frozen warzone forever, right?

Bajrang Dal, a less-than-30-year-old Hindu Nationalist outfit, took the responsibility of defending the honour of a more than 2,000-year-old Hinduism and disapproved of Indians and Pakistanis having cordial relations. They vandalised theatre screenings in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Comparatively, much more civilised protests were carried out in the city of Jammu by the same outfit.

Lokmat

The Marathi daily Lokmat released a cartoon accompanying an article to depict the funding pattern of ISIS on 29 November, 2015. A piggybank, with the Prophet’s signature was used to make the point. Muslims across the state of Maharashtra objected to it by burning the newspaper and even destroying the newspaper’s offices in Akola and Jalgaon.

Jon Stewart, Mazair Bahari and the Iranian state

The year was 2009. Former Newsweek correspondent Mazair Bahari participated in a satirical sketch on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show along with Jason Jones. The sketch talked about Mazair’s views on Iran, the upcoming elections, and was conducted by Jones, who was pretending to be an American spy. All in all, it had the makings of a good political satire. The Iranian government, however, completely missed the point when they presented clips from the show as evidence of Bahari’s involvement with American intelligence. Bahari’s interrogators used the clip, titled “Persians of Interest”, as proof that he had colluded with “foreign meddlers” and engaged in “media espionage”. On June 21, 2009, he was arrested by Iranian intelligence officers in the aftermath of the election demonstrations that swept across Tehran. For 118 days, Bahari was held in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison. His Iranian interrogators accused him of being a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency, Israel’s Mossad and Britain’s MI6.

Cut to 2013 and we had Stewart getting involved in the controversy, being labelled a “Zionist” and a CIA agent by segments of the Iranian government. The former director, producer and anchor of The Daily Show, later made a movie titled Rosewater based on Bahari’s account of his experience as a journalist, his time in Evin and on being tortured by the Iranian intelligence.

The Interview

The Interview is a satirical film on North Korea, directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. The plot involves a plan to assassinate Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s “Supreme Leader”. Unfortunately, they had underestimated the might of the state of North Korea, which has come closest to represent the “Orwellian nightmare”. The North Korean government felt the film was important enough to lodge a complaint in the United Nations. They also threatened the US government with a “merciless response”. They managed to intimidate Sony, the official distributor of the film. Sony initially planned to cancel the screening, evoking sharp criticism from Barack Obama himself. Sony changed its mind again and decided to screen the film at independent cinemas in the US and via on-demand services including Google play, YouTube movies and Netflix.

Nabil Soubye 

Yemen recently has been in the news for wrong reasons: Civil war and Islamic fundamentalism. It’s such a breath of fresh air when one finds out that satirists exist even in such desperate circumstances. Except it only makes front-page news when they are attacked by irate mobs that refuse to accept that we live in the 21^st century. Satirical journalist Nabil Soubye, who is unabashedly critical of Al Houthi (Iran-backed Shia militants) rule in Yemeni capital San’aa faced the wrath of a mob, which shot him on both of his legs and beat him up with sticks till he fell unconscious on January 4, 2016. He is temporarily paralysed. In some countries, the punishment one suffers for having a good sense of humour is paralysis.

Lars Vilks

Swedish artist Lars Vilks’ controversial cartoon depicting Prophet Muhammad in the year 2007 has managed to pierce a thorn so deep inside the flesh of some people that the pain refuses to go away.

On 14 February, 2015 a gunman opened fire in a café in Copenhagen, Denmark, where a free speech debate involving Lars’ Vilks was taking place. Unfortunately, a Norwegian filmmaker was killed and three police officers wounded. It is widely believed that Vilks was the target.

Dieudonné M’bala M’bala:

France, the state that stood up for the human right to crack a joke, seemed to have lost their sense of humour when they slapped a charge of “incitement of terrorism” against comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala. What was the crime, you ask? M’bala wrote “Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly” (I am Charlie Coulibaly) on his Facebook page as a satirical way of mocking the millions who were updating their status to “I am Charlie Hebdo”. Dieudonne, the police felt, was offering a gesture of solidarity with Amedy Coulibaly, the Islamist gunmen who shot down four hostages in a Kosher grocery store in Paris. Coulibaly’s attack came two days after the infamous Charlie Hebdo attacks.

Musa Kart

Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, was definitely not amused when cartoonist Musa Kart, who works for the Cumhuriyet Daily, published a caricature of him on February 1, 2014. The Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s office filed a criminal complaint against Kart for “insulting” and “slandering” the President. Kart’s cartoon criticised Erdogan for his attempts to cover-up a high-profile corruption scandal that shook the country earlier. Erdogan was depicted as a hologram keeping a watchful eye over a robbery in the controversial cartoon. Political satire, it seems, is not very palatable in Erdogan’s Turkey, for there have been other attempts to curb free speech and expression as well. 2014 also saw the government temporarily blocking social media networking sites YouTube and Twitter.

Our research confirmed our hunch that India isn’t the only country that’s having a hard time laughing. Other countries have also, from time to time, cracked down on humour and satire as well. Asia seemed to top the charts when it came to the state taking action against satirists, comedians or cartoonists for “defaming” the government. One noticeable trend emerges in Asia and Africa: The state machinery is more intolerant towards criticism than the public. Most of the attacks on satire in these regions came from the state apparatus rather than rogue elements. This suggests the need to strengthen and deepen democratic institutions.

In contrast, instances in the Western world, while not less in number, were mostly attacks orchestrated by individuals or groups rather than the state itself. France, however, did display its hypocrisy by targeting black comedian M’bala, even while its people were gathering in support of freedom of expression. While the numbers were lower in the “liberal west”, the data shows that these beacons of democracy aren’t completely immune to conservative tendencies.

Africa was the one continent where data was most elusive. This could mean two things: Africa is more progressive than the rest of the world or that the world isn’t too interested in documenting too many stories from the continent. The latter, unfortunately, seems more likely.