What’s On Your Mind?
As the sun went down one final time in 2020, Munawar Faruqui was preparing to taste fame. He was on his first pan-India tour. There was a carefulness in his speech, almost a reluctance. He was yet to reach the Instagram stories of Tanmay Bhat or the promotional posts of Netflix India. In Munawar’s line of work, success and fame are often measured in such social-media currency. His first resolution for 2021 would have been to scale the million-subscribers mountain on YouTube.
On the first evening of 2021, Munawar was on stage at a cafe in Indore when his life changed forever. A group of people walked inside the venue, one of them directly onto the stage, with a grievance against him. They had an issue with a joke he had released on YouTube eight months back, which referenced their religion’s flagship deity.
Munawar addressed the stone-faced intruder politely, referring to him as “sir” — in part kindness and part fear, you’d assume — and simplified the context of his joke. He was not insulting their religion; his jokes weren’t religious at all. He explained how his writing pad had a place for references to all faiths, including his own. The uninvited guest eventually left the stage. Under normal circumstances, which this situation was already beyond, Munawar could laugh this incidence off as intense heckling. But he knew. He had to know.
He was soon arrested under several sections of IPC 295 A. There were charges against him in two states. When the national press asked for evidence, the lawmakers showed a blank sheet and cited “an intent to offend”. Four of his friends, from the audience at Indore that night, were arrested too. Repeated bail applications were rejected with the verdict that the police “might find some evidence.”
Munawar Faruqui was released from jail on 6th February. A month in prison for a crime he did not commit. The Supreme Court — the highest desk of judiciary in India — had to intervene because all other forms of law and policy refused to abide by law and policy. Many of his supporters opened Twitter and wrote “Justice.”
Justice?
Most creative writing courses and teachers talk about the same principle for generating stories: all fiction must come from reality. George Orwell wrote a fictional book in 1949. It is safe to assume that his characters and stories were an extension of what he saw. That book is now a classic beyond classics, a piece of literature recommended to everyone. The influence of its plot is such that the word ‘Orwellian’ is used as an adjective today, seventy years after he made up a world from the synapses of his mind. It is a nice word, encompassing all the dark alleys of authoritarianism and dictatorship.
Munawar Faruqui is a stand-up comedian. His art functions on adding absurdity to the mundane. In that process, he is bound to touch upon topics or references which could be sensitive to someone listening. The establishment might have you believe otherwise, but his arrest is well beyond the realms of censorship. Censorship, problematic as it is, is still a barricade, a screening mechanism. What’s happening here is as iron-fisted as dictatorship can become. When artists are arrested on expected-offence, you might as well drop all pretence of freedom.
Last week, 4G internet returned to Kashmir after 550 days. The internet shutdown in Kashmir was one of the 400+ shutdowns the presiding government has dished out over the last four years — the highest for any democratic country. This week, the minister for electronics and information technology used parliament time to warn social media organisations — namely Facebook and Twitter — to comply or face a blanket ban.
In an episode of the dystopian Netflix TV series Black Mirror, armed soldiers hunt for human-like targets. They have grotesque faces and screeching voices. The story plays out through two significant reveals. The first shows the soldiers using brain implants which make the roaches look and sound repulsive. The second shows the protagonist’s implant glitching, revealing the real faces and voices of these roaches: normal sounding human beings of flesh and blood. The threat to mankind that the protagonist thought he was hunting were innocent people from a marginalised group. The others.
Our presiding government and its cronies have mastered the art of othering. It is a sobering thought because everyone is a potential other. Anything that the establishment blesses will be off-limits for negative discourse. Tweeting about a brand of tea that you found tasteless could land you in jail because, hey, the tea leaves are sourced from a plantation owned by a Member of Parliament. If the establishment considers it beneath intervention, their foot soldiers will leave you on a hospital bed struggling to keep up with your wounds. And that’s only for the lucky or privileged.
Munawar Faruqui is famous now. His videos on YouTube have more than a million hits. His social media inboxes will be rife with messages from brand managers tripping over themselves to benefit from his fame. The support he has received from so many corners must have warmed his heart. He just wouldn’t be the same comic, or person, anymore. The citadel of his personal safety has been breached.
Munawar probably has a skin of steel now, unstirred by heckling or criticism. But in an ideal world, he wouldn’t have to endure prison to find that steel.
