Translation of the cartoon:"Why are you afraid? Poonawalla, the owner of Serum, has declared that this vaccine contains only water, and that no one dies from the side effects of water!". - Adar Poonawalla is the managing director of the Serum Institute in India, which has taken over the responsibility of manufacturing the COVID-19 vaccine.
Indian cartoonist Hemant Malviya has been detained for a cartoon since the end of May. Now, his bail petition has been dismissed by Judge Subodh Abhyankar's chamber in Indore.
Malviya was arrested after he posted a cartoon on Facebook depicting a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu ultra-nationalist paramilitary organisation, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He was arrested by the police following a complaint by RSS activist and lawyer Vinay Joshi. His Facebook account is said to have been suspended and it is not known whether Facebook temporarily closed it in response to a legal claim as the message now appears to be that the author has restricted it.
According to local media reports, Hemant Malviya has been charged under sections 196, 299, 302, 352 and 353(3) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita - the Indian Penal Code that came into force on 1 July 2024 - for acts allegedly"disturbing communal harmony and religious sentiments". He was also allegedly charged under Section 67A of the Information Technology Act of 2000 for"electronic sharing of content depicting sexually explicit acts".
Whimsical interpretation of the law, already retrograde in itself. Someone giving a person a vaccination now turns out to be an"explicit sexual act". Either the cartoon in the complaint is not the one quoted in the media or I have missed something. Either way, it just goes to show that in India you can be jailed for drawing anything.
From what I understand, according to some sources, there are several cartoons reported for which he was arrested and in some of them, the author draws or makes some reference to the god Shiva, one of the main deities of Hinduism.
On 3 July, the Madhya High Court rejected his bail application, ruling that the RSS representative and the Chief Minister were depicted"in an undignified manner" and that the cartoonist's act was"deliberate and malicious and intended to offend the religious sentiments of the petitioner and the general public by insulting their religion, which is detrimental to the maintenance of harmony in society".
The State representative argued that, in the name of freedom of expression, he could not allow himself to draw a cartoon depicting the RSS and the Prime Minister in an "offensive and degrading" manner.
In an increasingly restrictive environment for freedom of expression and the increasing instrumentalisation of religion, the cartoonist's lawyer unsuccessfully argued that his work was essentially satirical and that his custody violated the Supreme Court's guidelines on arbitrary detention. The cartoonist's lawyer also argued that the cartoonist had merely drawn the cartoon and that he was not responsible for the comments his satirical work posted on Facebook provoked.
In fact, he has even been attributed the authorship of different comments that other people had added to the original cartoon, as the image had its own little meme effect and also several readers, and/or the author, versioned the image by adding different texts.
Sources consulted:
Humour in trouble, a collection of cases
Cases of cartoonists who have had problems of some importance because of their cartoons or satirical illustrations. There are also some stories of other people who, without being cartoonists, have got into trouble for sharing them.
