Indore cartoonist agrees to delete ‘undignified’ Modi caricature after Supreme Court criticism

An Indore-based cartoonist who was booked for depicting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in an allegedly undignified manner, on Monday agreed to remove his social media post after being verbally criticised by the Supreme Court, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia and Aravind Kumar was hearing a special leave petition filed by cartoonist Hemant Malviya challenging a Madhya Pradesh High Court order denying him anticipatory bail in the case against him.

The High Court in its July 3 order observed that Malviya had “clearly overstepped” the limits of free speech and misused his right to expression. The court held that the cartoonist had failed to exercise discretion while publishing the caricature, and held that his custodial interrogation was necessary.

During the hearing on Monday, the Supreme Court verbally criticised the cartoonist. Following this, his counsel agreed that the post would be deleted.

Malviya also agreed to issue a statement saying that by amending his work, he was not endorsing the allegedly objectionable comments.

His counsel agreed that Malviya’s comments and the cartoon, while not being an offence, could be considered to be “unpalatable” or in “poor taste”, Live Law reported.

When the court was told that the Malviya was over 50 years old, Justice Dhulia remarked that the post was still immature and inflammatory.

The case will be heard next on Tuesday.

The case

Malviya had published the original cartoon on January 6, 2021, which depicted Modi as a doctor administering an injection to a man dressed in what may have appeared to some as the uniform of the RSS.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

It was accompanied with the Hindi caption: “Why are you worried? Serum’s Poonawala has said that the vaccine only has water, you won’t die from the side effect of water!”

This was a reference to Serum Institute of India’s chief executive Adar Poonawalla alleging that many Covid-19 vaccines in the market were only as effective as water.

According to the Madhya Pradesh High Court order, a Facebook user had republished the cartoon, but replaced the caption with one in which the man in the purported RSS uniform addresses Modi as an incarnation of the Hindu deity Shiva and asks to be injected with such a strong dose of the caste census in his buttocks so that he forgets the Pahalgam terror attack, the controversial Waqf Act, among other matters.

Malviya had shared the amended version of his cartoon on Facebook on May 1, writing that anyone could use any of his cartoons by writing their own names and captions. All his cartoons were for the public, by the public and dedicated to the public, he said.

He added that the amended cartoon was shared with him by a friend and that whoever had created the caption had written well.

Based on this, a RSS member had filed a complaint, alleging that Malviya had posted objectionable content on Facebook that defamed the Hindutva organisation and hurt religious sentiments.

Malviya was booked in May under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Information Technology Act pertaining to promoting enmity between different groups, acts intended to outrage religious feelings, intentional insult and electronically publishing or transmitting material containing sexually explicit acts.

Malviya has argued that he was falsely implicated in the case and that his work was merely satire. He also said that the comments about the caricature on Facebook were not his own, and therefore, he could not be held responsible for them.

Also read: Why MP High Court ordered a cartoonist to be arrested for lampooning Modi and RSS