The Mumbai Police is currently trying to figure out how to take a Snapchat video off Facebook and Google.
Comedian Tanmay Bhat's Snapchat video making fun of cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and singer Lata Mangeshkar garnered enough outrage on Sunday for it to result in a First Information Report filed with the Mumbai Police.
As a result, Additional Commissioner of the Cyber Crime Cell Yashwant Pathak told ANI that they had got in touch with Google, YouTube and Facebook to block the video that some had complained to be offensive.
Bhat's video, captioned Sachin vs Lata Civil War, uses Snapchat's face-swapping technology allowing him to appropriate the faces of the celebrities. With both played by Bhat himself, the video has Tendulkar and Mangeshkar arguing about who is the better player – Tendulkar or Virat Kohli – using humour that hasn't gone down so well with the more sensitive crowd.
Mumbai's parochial political parties, the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, saw the opportunity to beat the Maharashtrian offence drum and file FIRs against Bhat for outraging their sentiments. Many also took to Twitter to decry Bhat's "cheap" humour, with actor Anupam Kher using the opportunity to tell people how many awards he has won.
Reports suggest the Mumbai Police is currently talking to legal experts about whether it can actually block Bhat's video, now that Section 66 of the Information Technology Act is no longer around. The government would most likely have to use sections of the Indian Penal Code that are usually invoked in such cases if they want to take the video down.
Tendulkar and Mangeshkar themselves have, at the time of writing, not said anything about the matter.
TV channel NewsX, however, has.
Bhat knew he was going to get into trouble when he posted the video, putting out the disclaimer that, "I obvously love Lata and Sachin, just having some fun." Bhat's comedy troupe, All India Bakchod, has had similar legal troubles in the past with its AIB Knockout show.
He also later tweeted, jokingly, that Snapchat, which many more people are now talking about, should pay him for the publicity.
NewsX decided to take this seriously, and took the editorial line across its channel and online that Bhat was not just content with "cheap PR" but was also demanding money for it.
AajTak got in on the game too.
This failure to understand Bhat's humour, from the news channels and the Mumbai Police, naturally got plenty of reaction on Twitter.
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