Modi’s recent trip to Saudi Arabia and his closeness to the Saudis has been criticised as well as mocked. This is simply what Chopra was doing. Yet, this act of political humour has been treated as something criminal by India’s ruling party.

A sea of doctoring

This kind of pressure is a significant danger to our freedom of expression. Besides, morphed photos and doctored videos are now so pervasive that to pick on one simply because it mocks a leader seems hypocritical in the extreme.

In the recent the Jawaharlal Nehru University fracas, doctored videos aired by news channels provoked arrests and violence in the heart of Delhi. But no action was taken against the channels that broadcast the manipulated footage. At the same time, a tweet from a fake account even fooled the Delhi police and union home minister Rajnath Singh into thinking that the protest by students at JNU had the backing of Pakistani terrorist Hafiz Muhammad Saeed.

In fact, doctored images might actually have played a role in helping the BJP win the national election in 2014. During the campaign, social media was flooded with fake images of Chinese cities purporting to be Gujarat or Narendra Modi ostensibly sweeping the floor—to show his humble origins. As recently as December 2015, the government’s press information bureau had itself tweeted a photoshopped image of the prime minister conducting an aerial survey of a flooded Chennai.

After its own sins of commission, for India’s ruling party to haul up a private citizen for cracking a joke about a politician borders on the surreal.

Signs of totalitarianism

As social scientists have noted, the strict policing of comedy is one of the most definite sign of totalitarianism. In the 1930s, the citizens of Nazi Germany coined a new term for subversive humour: Flüsterwitze, whisper joke—since they obviously couldn’t be told out loud. Citizens of the USSR even went so far as to invent a new type of joke, anekdoti, passed orally, which poked fun at the bleak life that Stalinism had to offer.

Publicly ribbing leaders, politicians, and the powerful is one of the most enduring barometers we have of freedom and liberty. History teaches us that societies that criminalise political humour almost always go on to pull rather more brutal pranks on their own members.

This post first appeared on Scroll.in. We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.

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