Politicians need to remember this: in cities, towns and villages, people are making fun of them, and it is their right

Here we go again. One argument made by the apologists of the current regime in New Delhi is that those who criticise the Prime Minister, the RSS-BJP and the Sangh Parivar are elitists out of touch with the mainstream of Indian society. There is nothing wrong, say the chaddi chamchas, with a ‘robust Hindu self-affirmation’, with the much-awaited reawakening of a sense of pride in the majority religion and an assumed ‘Hindu nation’.

One of the many problems with this formulation is that it cherry-picks what is included and excluded in the definition of ‘mainstream’. So, the fact that a majority of Indians are now non-vegetarian is not mainstream, but a supposed ‘social sanction’ against the eating of beef is deemed to be so.

The fact that the reality for a majority of Indians is the struggle for a decent livelihood, proper food, shelter and health care is not mainstream, but the idea of a burgeoning superpower spending obscene amounts of its annual budget on armaments is to be accepted without question. In the same category of self-serving hypocrisy falls this business of prosecuting and hounding people who are deemed to have ‘insulted’ such and such political leader or institution or national symbol.

Right to be irreverent

Down the ages, the one weapon the poor and downtrodden have always had is their ribald irreverence for the powers that be. Whether in poetry or song, whether in dance, folk theatre or traditional procession, this is manifested in so many different Indian languages and cultures; the raja, the nawab, the daroga, the mullah, the pandit, the jotedar, the collector, and more recently the MLA or MP have always been the butt of extremely sharp jokes, spoofs and caricatures. This is the mainstream Indian culture that the prissy, prudish, power-greedy middle and upper classes find so disgusting and threatening. Clearly this irreverence is to be denied and punished as the powers that be develop an ever thinner skin, an ever more insecure idea of their own pomp and supposedly unassailable importance.

All India Bakchod (AIB) and other spoof-makers and stand-up comics may take a lot from the Western notions of television comedy and satire but they are also part of the very Indian tradition of making fun of the rich and powerful. The brouhaha around their recent post where they pasted elements of a dog’s face on to Narendra Modi’s face is worth examining.

The Modi dog face wasn’t even particularly witty or funny, it was childish, like a student drawing a moustache or horns on a photograph of some teacher or historical figure. A far funnier example of this kind of thing was when someone put a Mohawk wig on the bald pate of Winston Churchill’s statue in Whitehall — there was supposedly ‘the greatest Briton ever’ suddenly transformed into a racist street thug or at least into a punk rocker. Mr. Modi himself is an absurd enough figure, one who gives us rich opportunities for laughter and derision, so one wonders why the normally quite funny bunch at AIB couldn’t come up with anything better.

Next, the outrage and the police FIR, etc. are in themselves outrageous: the people protesting on Shri Modi’s behalf love it when the opponents of the regime are ridiculed on the Web in the worst, most obscene terms; and the police surely have better things to do than chase someone who’s made a jejune photo-joke.

Inadvertent publicity

Then there is the question as to why AIB deleted their post. Their answer was, we always play cat and mouse with the powerful, we make little forays into satire and pull back when we think it strategically wise, that’s how we roll and will continue to roll. Their defence was, we spend a lot of money on court cases, we have several FIRs against us, so, thank you but shut up, we know best how to defend our work, how to survive to fight another day.

In any case, the post with the two photographs including the dog-face has now gone viral. Despite them deleting it, the police have decided to act, so the fun and games may only just be starting. Guardians of the law across the country and under all sorts of different political parties all need to be given workshops on freedom of speech.

One of the things they need to understand is this: the first deal any public figures make in a democracy is that in return for their public stature and visibility, they can be questioned, ridiculed and caricatured. If they go against this unwritten deal, then they do not believe in the tenets of democracy. Simple.

Even as the cops prosecute the AIB crew, even as their top lawyers defend them, what the politicians of this country need to remember is this: in the small towns and villages, in the backstreets of the cities, around the tea stalls and paan shops, millions of people are making fun of them right now, and laughing and cursing them in the most extreme, bitter and bitterly funny terms. That is mainstream India and it is not going away anytime soon.