The vise tightens
On 4 June 2021, Manjul, an Indian cartoonist, tweeted ‘Jai ho Modiji ki sarkaar ki’ (‘Praise be to the Modi government’) with a screenshot of an email.1 Twitter’s legal department had written to notify him that Indian law enforcement had requested they take down @MANJULtoons, Manjul’s Twitter account, because the content ‘violates the law(s) of India’.
Which ‘law(s)’, it did not specify. Never mind the fact that the Indian Constitution guarantees the freedom of speech and expression.
‘At first, I thought it was a prank,’ Manjul told New Internationalist. ‘I have been drawing cartoons since 1988 and have been posting them on social media for 10 years. I never got any notices, letters or warnings from any government until now.’ He added that this was ‘intimidation’ because the incident ‘will remain somewhere in the corner of my mind when I draw, telling me that I am on the government’s radar’.
Manjul’s case is but one example among a multitude. String
