How many more Munawars to go?

Stand-up comedian Munawar Faruqui, 30, who’s once been bizarrely jailed for cracking a joke he never did in Indore, recently bid adieu to the world of stand-up after bearing the brunt of groups that took offence to his jokes. Pic/Twitter

A stand-up comic can either kill it, or bomb, on stage - depending on how the show went! Yet, the comedian is furthest from a terrorist, for they indulge in joke-telling, which is actually the opposite of violence.

Meaning, using words - through rhetoric/hyperbole/exaggeration, observational humour or plain satire - to respond to the world we live in. As an audience, you enjoy, agree/disagree, and obtain your time's worth; or get bored, smugly smirk, and move on.

The best answer to stand-up comedy is stand-up comedy still. An eye for an eye here, implying a word for a word; and this can go across to other fields too, like say in journalism - hopefully an NDTV to a Republic, a The Wire to an OpIndia, a CNN to a Fox News, etc. Choice is yours. Likewise with other media; loha lohe ko kaat-ta hai, as they say. You don't bring a sword
to play cricket!

When does simple art, based on multiple expressions, turn into a political act? Chiefly, when anybody's right to take offence supersedes someone's right to express - through threats/costs, economic ruin being foremost, if the latter doesn't step back, or STFU.

What good is the right to freedom of speech and expression - detailed in the Constitution, in turn defining a nation - if it does not religiously protect against people taking offence? If everyone agreed on everything, that fundamental right to free speech/expression would've been unnecessary, no? Also, tell me a joke that doesn't offend.

And yet over the past few years - much of it has to do with social media, undisclosed portions of it hijacked by paid armies for political ends - the drill to kill the Constitution has been so familiar, it's turned into a lame joke that bears repetition nonetheless.

Whether it's ads, films, stand-up comedies or personal blogs, public-shaming trolls take over to show the creator their place under the sun, which is to disturbingly hide in dread and disbelief. The offended, although in their personal capacity, but claiming to represent a massive majority in a mobocracy, pretending to be democracy, often hurl charges that are weirder still.

For instance, if "Hindus" have apparently been hurt by an ad, those pushing back to say they weren't are termed "liberals", and therefore "Hinduphobes". Only that most of these so-called liberals are Hindus themselves (as for most of India itself), which is like calling a Jew a holocaust denier or a Sikh a 1984 sympathiser!

In case of an ad, the corporate firm, by far the meekest corner of Indian society, bearing the brunt, instantly calls off the commercial, fearing loss of reputation or market share. Victory bugles go off, until the next round begins. There is a minimum of one such easy distraction every week. How many more to go?

For vulnerable individual artistes - from bloggers, stand-up comics, to filmmakers - the fear appears even more real. At least one of them I met recently told me, repeating until she was sure, "It's off the record: I'm totally f'''''!"

Why? Because nobody knows which of those scary threats to life, on Twitter/social media, could have direct consequences in real life. There is one such easy distraction every day. How many more Vir Dases, or self-proclaimed Weirdasses, to go? Das's defence against people taking offence to his joke is it's really that - a joke. So what, if it wasn't though.

Stuffy self-censorship is upon arts as a result already. I've watched Das test his material once at a rehearsal before a private group. He hardly goes half the distance to push the envelope on stage, as he does in a practice session. That's a cricketer twice as good on the nets as before a stadium crowd! In all of this, there are those who speak up, berating those who don't - seriously, can't tell why?

On the ground, the supposedly offended groups, like multi-headed hydra, with ever changing names for Manch and Sena, multiply; prefixed with the name of a community they claim to represent. One such wrote to the Bengaluru police to cancel a show of stand-up comedian Munawar Faruqui, 30, who's once been bizarrely jailed for cracking a joke he never did in Indore.

He's reportedly performed the Bengaluru set in Bengaluru itself. Even had his script passed in Maharashtra, which continues with a regressive law for stage performances. Never mind that, the Supreme Court says you don't need police permission to perform in private. In this case, 600-plus people, who'd bought tickets, but aren't an armed/vigilante group, or from a wider organisation equipped to equally defend their right to not feel offended by jokes. The police feared the mob. Canned show. Forfeiting their monopoly over violence. Making the state seem redundant. How many more Munawars to go?

While it is the state, more than courts, that is designed to negotiate between folks, who wish to do something, and others who're not being forced into it, anyway.

What good is the state that is unable to save citizens from a mob, then? As good as Brits who gave Rushdie head-of-state level security against Islamic fundamentalists? Equally baffling is "strategic silence" on most such matters by political parties opposed to the government. Cementing a perception that there is no alternative.

I disagree with Das's ‘Two Indias' six-minute monologue that seemed as if it was breaking up India itself! Nope, there is really only one India. Worth protecting, surely?

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14

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