When the young Afghan threw the shoe at then President Bush, the world erupted in mirth and for weeks afterwards cartoons lampooning him filled the pages of newspapers, magazines and the internet. Satirists on US TV and stand up comics made hay. Bush doesn’t seem to have sued anyone over the fact. In fact he himself made some feeble jokes about it.

These and similar things have happened to political figures around the world, with similar reactions – ie without paranoia, without fragile egos being bruised, without “ who do they think they are?” reactions from irate public figures.

So what happens in India? Do we laugh about things like this? Do we dare? Would a paper or TV station’s advertising revenue from government advertisements disappear, and would the paper/TV’s management sack the offending journalist for that?

The answer is quite simple. No we don’t dare. Humour, or satire, is immediately taken as disrespect by our politicians and public figures, with their high levels of insecurity. Otherwise wouldn’t the media be thick with cartoons right now? Flying swine would be filling our air spaces and columns – but no, not a thing.

What can one say about a society, a democracy that gags itself out of fear of reprisals? I am not talking of a media gagging itself from revealing names,  or not printing photos that might incite violence or bring shame to innocent people. In fact our media has no compunctions about that at all. TV stations, even DD Girnar in its crime show at prime time on Sundays used to, probably still does, show the most gruesome images of beheaded people and women burnt as witches, repeatedly till one felt sick. I am talking of cartoons, or of reporting about the misdeeds of powerful people.

Let me give another example of how power is wielded to gag.

Most of you must remember the false fractures scam in the school exams a couple of years ago. There were three students in the scam. Harsh Kotak, Komal Patel, and Ruhi Adani. It was recently reported in the press that the state education board has finally charge-sheeted H N Chavda who allegedly roped in tutors to help Harsh and Komal. And what happened to Ruhi ADANI? Well, her surname happened. Suddenly she and her broken bone disappeared from the pages of the papers following the scam and from all the charge-sheets. Because there is huge advertising revenue involved. And a power house of a business conglomerate. Self gagging.

But my question is not only about the media. They are only the public side of the debate. What about the deafening silence repeated time and time again by our educated middle and upper classes? We turn into Gandhiji’s three monkeys every time it is time to speak up. “Chhodone. Kaun jhanjhat ma pade?”

We are kidding ourselves about our great democracy if the fear of Mota Manas has made us all into servile dummies tolerating everything, all falsehoods, all debate, all satire, all injustice.

And we would be forgetting history if we think that we are safe in such a gagged atmosphere. For as Rev. Martin Neimoller wrote in the times of Hitler

First they came for the Communists,

  and I didn’t speak up,

    because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

  and I didn’t speak up,

    because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,

  and I didn’t speak up,

    because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

  and by that time there was no one

    left to speak up for me.

If we wish to have freedom of speech, then we must have the courage to speak up, to laugh at the absurdities of our system and politicians, to speak the truth. Otherwise we are living a faked democracy.