Culture

‘Brazen Overreach’: Editors Guild Expresses Shock at Govt’s Blocking of Site Over Modi Cartoon

‘What is more deplorable is the abrupt manner in which access to the entire web portal was blocked, purportedly, after the state head of a political party complained to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting…’

New Delhi: The Editors Guild of India has expressed deep shock at the recent blocking of the Tamil magazine web portal Vikatan.com, without adherence to due process by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) over the publication of a cartoon depicting prime minister Narendra Modi.

The website became inaccessible soon after the Tamil Nadu cadre of the Bharatiya Janata Party took exception to a cartoon published on February 10, showing Modi sitting shackled next to US President Donald Trump.

“Cartoons have always been a legitimate means of journalistic endeavour and the sudden blocking of the Vikatan website is a brazen instance of overreach by the authorities,” the guild said.

The statement is signed by guild president Anant Nath, general secretary Ruben Banerjee and treasurer K Ve Prasad.

“What is more deplorable is the abrupt manner in which access to the entire web portal was blocked, purportedly, after the state head of a political party complained to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), against the said cartoon. No prior notices were issued and no opportunity was given to Ananda Vikatan – the group behind the web portal – for a fair hearing,” it said.

The Editors Guild said that it was also appalled to learn that after the website was blocked, a notice was sent to the publishers, calling them for a hearing by an Inter-Departmental Committee constituted under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (IT Rules 2021), to consider the request for blocking. “In a manner of speaking, after an order was arbitrarily implemented, due process was initiated,” the guild noted.

The guild sought to note that there is already a stay by the Bombay high court, on Rule 9(1) and (3) of the IT Rules 2021, which pertains to the Code of Ethics, and therefore limiting the powers of the Inter-Departmental Committee to examine complaints against publishers on these grounds.

“The entire episode smacks of high-handedness and militates against the cherished ideals of a free press. The blocking of the website, coming amid growing concerns over media freedom in the country, does no good to India’s democratic traditions that value fair play and transparency,” it said.

The guild also said it was saddened to learn that the cartoonist behind the work has been subjected to harsh trolling on social media, as well as death threats.

It called on the MeitY to roll back the blocking order and ensure that it is “never guided by any arbitrariness when dealing with free speech and expression.”

The Supreme Court Is Policing Morality, Justice Remains Elusive

India is already witnessing an erosion of free expression. Judicial moral policing and the potential facilitation of a wider censorship regime will only accelerate this decline.

It is rather rich of the Supreme Court to preach morality when, not too long ago, not a single Supreme Court judge publicly objected to their Chief Justice presiding over cases despite serious allegations of sexual harassment.

On February 17, the Supreme Court heard YouTuber Ranveer Allahbadia’s plea for interim protection in multiple obscenity cases over his remarks in a comedy show, India’s Got Latent. A two-judge bench, led by Justice Surya Kant and comprising Justice N Kotiswar Singh, stayed Allahbadia’s arrest on the condition that he cooperates with the police and appears before the investigating officers when summoned. The court also barred further FIRs based on the same show but did not decide on clubbing them.

A gag order

However, more troubling is the sweeping condition barring Allahbadia and his associates from airing “any show” on YouTube or other audio-visual platforms “until further orders.” This restriction, imposed without a shred of justification, curtails their freedom of speech and expression under Article 19(1)(a) and their fundamental right to practise any profession or occupation under Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution.

While the state may impose reasonable restrictions on these fundamental rights, like in the public interest, it has a duty to justify their necessity, proportionality, and reasonableness. One would expect the highest court to explain why it deemed it necessary to bar someone from their profession and gag their future speech. Yet, the Supreme Court imposed this condition on Allahbadia and his associates arbitrarily – paternalistic, sweeping, and entirely unaccountable – emblematic of its mai-baap approach, wherein it sees itself as the ultimate arbiter of all things, unburdened by the need to justify its own excesses.

This sweeping condition is particularly striking given that Justice Kant, sitting with Justices DY Chandrachud and AS Bopanna, had ruled against such restrictions in fact-checker Mohammed Zubair’s bail case.

In 2022, the Supreme Court held that prohibiting Zubair from tweeting, which the state of Uttar Pradesh pressed for, would amount to an unconstitutional gag order:

“A blanket order directing the petitioner to not express his opinion – an opinion he is rightfully entitled to hold as an active, participating citizen – would be disproportionate to the purpose of imposing conditions on bail. The imposition of such a condition would amount to a gag order against the petitioner. Gag orders have a chilling effect on the freedom of speech… Passing an order restricting him from posting on social media would constitute an unjustified violation of the freedom of speech and expression, and the freedom to practise his profession,” the three-judge bench had held.

‘Vibe jurisprudence’

Now, leading a smaller two-judge bench, Justice Kant has taken a completely contradictory position. If a judge radically departs from a legal reasoning they previously endorsed, judicial discipline demands an explanation in the order. The lack of one here reinforces concerns about what I call “vibe jurisprudence,” where judicial outcomes are contingent on individual judges rather than consistent legal principles. The only rationale behind this restriction is the biases of the bench, reflected in the remarks made before the order was dictated.

Clearly infuriated, Justice Kant described Allahbadia as having “dirt in his mind” and accused him and others on the panel of “perversion,” even questioning why courts should favour him.

“The words you have chosen – parents will feel ashamed. Daughters and sisters will feel ashamed. Your younger brothers will feel ashamed. The entire society feels ashamed,” he remarked. The Supreme Court has repeatedly instructed lower courts to avoid prejudicing investigations and trials with extraneous remarks at the interim stage. Yet here, Courtroom Number 3 of the Supreme Court has itself violated that principle.

Whimsical punishment

When Allahbadia’s counsel, Abhinav Chandrachud, cited a 2024 Supreme Court ruling distinguishing between profanity and obscenity – arguing that the obscenity charges were unfounded – the apex court quickly shifted the discussion to “societal values” and proceeded to establish its moral superiority over the petitioner.

Justice Kant queried about the “parameters” of “self-evolved societal values” within which a “responsible citizen” should behave. The decision to bar Allahbadia and his associates from airing any show was grounded in this entirely subjective standard of morality. This is judicial punishment rooted not in law but in personal sentiment. The court ignored the fact that what one judge finds outrageous may not be equally offensive to another. Crass as Allahbadia’s joke may be, the court had no business exceeding constitutional boundaries to deliver whimsical punishment before an investigation was even completed. Even if we dismiss this as an isolated incident, cases such as this grab many eyeballs and the Court’s conduct, if irrational, has a chilling effect. More importantly, orders such as this also set a very dangerous precedent – emboldening moral policing in an increasingly autocratic nation where freedoms are eroding.

One cannot completely dismiss concerns that there may be more at play. The Supreme Court’s moralising and overreach aside, more concerning is Justice Surya Kant’s explicit desire to “do something” about OTT regulation. The bench has summoned the Attorney-General for India and the Solicitor General of India for the next hearing to discuss this issue. This is deeply troubling.

A digital dice is cast

The Supreme Court lacks the capacity, technical expertise, and institutional bandwidth to craft regulations for digital content. The participatory democracy that the Supreme Court itself has extolled requires consultation with all stakeholders, particularly on sensitive issues with wide-ranging implications for free speech. The judiciary is hardly the appropriate forum for such a discussion on a law. Over five crore cases are pending before Indian courts. The country cannot afford its future Chief Justice embarking on a whimsical crusade to regulate OTT platforms while urgent judicial concerns remain unaddressed. The court is surely aware of its limitations.

Then what is this about?

The court’s intervention could revive the shelved Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, 2024. This proposed law, criticised for its sweeping scope, sought to regulate not just OTT platforms and digital news but also individual content creators and social media users. Among its many problematic provisions was mandatory prior registration with the government—a measure widely condemned for enabling state overreach. If the Court’s intervention nudges the government towards reviving the Bill, it will have effectively provided legal cover for broader censorship.

India is already witnessing an erosion of free expression. Judicial moral policing and the potential facilitation of a wider censorship regime will only accelerate this decline. It is not the Supreme Court’s job to police morality or craft content regulations. The court must back off and resist the temptation to play guardian of societal values. Instead, it should focus on improving justice delivery and hearing challenges to laws that are inconsistent with constitutional principles – such as the Delhi Services Act, 2023.

Saurav Das is an investigative journalist writing on law, the judiciary, and policy.

India, Globally: ‘Ghar Wapsi,’ Poor Diplomacy and More Adani

A fortnightly highlight of how the world is watching our democracy.

The Narendra Modi government frequently posits India as a ‘Vishwaguru’ or world leader. How the world sees India is often lost in this branding exercise.

Outside India, global voices are monitoring and critiquing human rights violations in India and the rise of Hindutva. We present here fortnightly highlights of what a range of actors – from UN experts and civil society groups to international media and parliamentarians of many countries – are saying about the state of India’s democracy.

Read the fortnightly roundup for February 1-15, 2025.

International media reports

Washington Post, USA, February 1

Karishma Mehrotra reports on the efforts of “India’s right-wing Hindu movement” to “convince millions of tribal people who have long remained outside mainstream religion” that “they, too, are Hindu”. Mehrotra focuses on Vikas Bharati, affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which operates in Bishunpur, Jharkhand.

A Hindu cultural organisation, Vikas Bharti works with tribal communities through several initiatives, including those related to education, health and agriculture. According to Dhirendra Jha, an author who has studied the RSS, these efforts exploit the “absence of the state” but are also helped by government support. Vikas Bharati reports show that “nearly 90 percent of its funding comes from governments”. The organisation not only tries to persuade non-Christian tribal people to identify as Hindu, but also conducts “ghar wapsi” or “reconverting” Christian tribal people to their “original” Hindu status. According to analysts and observers, the work of such organisations has proved “unexpectedly effective” in persuading tribals to “change their religious patterns”. It is also “deepening divisions in tribal communities among Hindus, Christians and nature-worshipers”, writes Mehrotra.

The Economist, UK, February 4

In its comparison between India and China’s performance in South Asia, the Economist notes that regional leaders are going “to-and-fro” between India and China. This is partly because they are “playing Asia’s giants against each other”. There is also the issue of India’s “poor diplomacy”, while China exploits “strategic openings”.

Senior Indian diplomatic and security figures feel that India has been “too heavy-handed” and “failed to nurture links to opposition parties and civil society or promote a common sense of values and identity”. Some lay the blame on the Prime Minister’s “hostility to political opponents and non-governmental organisations” and note that “his Hindu nationalism often backfires too (especially in Muslim-majority Bangladesh)”. Another worry is India’s reliance on Adani in competing for infrastructure projects, with current setbacks in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka both seeking to review major projects. Underlining the fundamental problem, the Economist comments that although Narendra Modi promotes India as “an emerging world power and a champion of the global south”, yet “officials across the region say it is still unclear what India stands for in its own backyard”.

The Guardian, UK, February 12

Hannah Ellis-Peterson and Ravi Nair reveal that the Indian government amended and relaxed security protocols along the Pakistan border to allow for the construction of the Khavda plant in Gujarat, reportedly the “largest renewable energy project in the world”, by the Adani Group. Based on documents, Peterson and Nair write that the Gujarat state government “lobbied at the highest levels” to obtain land in the Rann of Kutch region for “solar and wind construction”. National security rules do not allow for “any major construction beyond existing villages and roads up to 10km from the border with Pakistan, preventing any large-scale installation of solar panels”. Private government communications and documents seen by the Guardian show that the Ministry of Defence “amended security protocols to make sensitive territory on the India-Pakistan border commercially viable”.

Experts say

India Hate Lab, a project of the Center for the Study of Organized Hate, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C., released a report looking at social media and hate speech in India. The report analyses the role of social media in amplifying hate speech at mass public gatherings in 2024, including political rallies, electoral campaign events, religious processions, protest marches, demonstrations, and cultural or nationalist gatherings. The report finds that the incidence of hate speech “targeting religious minorities” increased by 74% in 2024 from 2023. It highlights that 98.5% of hate speeches targeted Muslims using language of “jihad-based conspiracies” and “Bangladeshi-infiltrator bogey” and also that “dangerous speech” (defined as “speech that increases the risk that its audience will condone or participate in violence against members of another group”) rose. It says there was a “notable peak” in hate speech in May 2024, a key time during India’s general elections.

Transparency International’s (TI) 2024 Corruption Perception Index reveals how India, among other Asia-Pacific countries, has “failed to deliver on anti-corruption pledges”. India is ranked 96 out of 180, falling one point from 2023. TI notes that India has been “embroiled in a US indictment of a clean energy business due to more than US$250 million paid in bribes to Indian government officials” in pursuing solar energy contracts of billions of dollars. As the recipient of “more climate finance” than other countries in the region, TI says India “must do much more to safeguard clean energy initiatives.”

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders made public on February 13 a brief version of a communication previously sent by her and other UN experts to the Government of India in November 2024 on the “alleged arbitrary arrest, detention and physical assault as a form of torture and/or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment of environmental human rights defender Mr. Bijendra Korram”. The UN experts shared that Mr. Korram was “allegedly arbitrarily arrested” while participating in peaceful protests by Adivasi communities against mining in the state of Chhattisgarh. They highlight the “punitive charges” against him, “which appear to have been fabricated with the intention of hindering his peaceful and legitimate human rights activities”. They point out that he was denied access to a lawyer and was brought before a judge many hours after the mandated time after arrest. The Indian government has not replied to this to date.

Read the previous roundup here.

Why Ranveer Allahbadia’s Bad Joke on the Family Got Indians So Riled Up

Jokes on women or members of the LGBTQIA+ community are made regularly without any repercussions because they don’t pose a threat to India’s public morality. A perceived attack on the hetero-patriarchal family unit, though, is a whole other story.

Ranveer Allahbadia’s recent remark on Samay Raina’s show India Got Latent has caused a massive stir across India. To one of the contestants on the show, Ranveer had asked, “Would you rather watch your parents have sex, or you will join them once and finish it off?”

The backlash was so intense that it led to multiple FIRs being filed, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) stepping in, and even statements being issued by two chief ministers. The issue also made its way into parliament’s budget session. But what was it about Allahabdia’s comment that provoked such a strong reaction from all sides of the political spectrum, uniting the government and the opposition?

The main criticism of Allahbadia’s remark centres around three key phrases: obscenity, vulgarity and sexually explicit content. These words also constitute Assam chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma’s tweet announcing the FIR against Allahbadia, Raina and others involved. However, the controversy goes beyond just the specific comment – it highlights deeper issues about public morality in India.

Incest, as a topic, is deeply troubling for public morality in India, but a crucial question arises: why are remarks about incest seen as such a major moral violation, while jokes that mock women, LGBTQIA+ people, and other minorities are often overlooked or even normalised? To answer this, we need to look beyond the public figures involved, Allahbadia and Raina, and understand how gender norms and patriarchal values influence the way society reacts to such issues.

The trajectories of the personalities

Raina gained fame for his “dark humour”, which has been widely criticised. His brand of humour has strayed far from the original intent of dark humour, which was meant to help marginalised communities cope with trauma. Instead, it has become a tool for ridiculing these very communities. Raina argues that humour should be free and that everyone should be able to joke about anything, even if it offends someone. In this view, humour doesn’t need to consider the power dynamics within society – jokes about women, transgender persons, Muslims and survivors of sexual assault are, in his view, just jokes.

Allahbadia – aka Beer Biceps – is a podcaster who has gained widespread popularity in recent years. He often invites controversial guests, including right-wing politicians, spiritual leaders with questionable reputations and people who promote pseudo-scientific views. Despite being considered pro-government, Allahbadia’s recent comment has turned some of his political allies against him. This raises the question: what was so controversial about his remark that even those aligned with him felt the need to distance themselves?

Public morality and hetero-patriarchy

To understand why Allahbadia’s comment created such a storm, we need to examine the role of public morality in Indian society. Public morality is a set of values and standards that dictate what is considered acceptable behaviour in society. In India, these values are heavily influenced by hetero-patriarchy, a system where male dominance and heterosexual/heternormative relationships, particularly imagined through a monogamous family structure, are seen as the foundations of society.

In this hetero-patriarchal system, the sanctity of the heterosexual monogamous patriarchal family becomes paramount. This idea of this family has been idealised as the backbone of Indian society. Any act of destabilisation, or even a mild transgression, can thus invoke strong responses. The institution of the family and the discourse around it have been reinforced by both social norms and legal frameworks. However, this view has not remained static and has evolved over time, especially after India’s independence.

Also read: Poor Joke or Convenient Target? Understanding the Case Against Ranveer Allahbadia

Historical imaginations of family and public morality

To understand how public morality has evolved, it’s necessary to look back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the Indian nationalist movement, the “women’s question” became a central topic. Nationalists were concerned with the portrayal of Indian women as helpless and oppressed, a view promoted by the British. Indian reformers, often upper-caste men, constructed the image of the “new woman” who had to be educated enough to become an ardhangini (half-companion) in marriage with the task of raising ‘good’, ‘moral’ children.

The “new woman” was designated the guardian of the “domestic sphere” – a sphere of life, according to the Indian nationalists, where Indians had an upper hand over the colonisers. The British, they argued, had attained superiority in the “material sphere” of science, technology and governance, but they could never conquer the “domestic sphere” of familial life and spiritual life, dotted with moral values and civilisational ethos, respectively.

The “domestic sphere” required the invention of a sacrosanct familial tradition, which was continuous and unchanging for most parts. This rested on middle class, upper caste ideas of heterosexual monogamous patriarchal family, partly informed by a reimagination of the ‘great’ Indian past of epics and ancient law-books, and partly by Victorian notions of the family. Women were seen as guardians of family values, tasked with raising children and maintaining moral order. Gandhian ideas about women, which emphasised purity and marriage for reproduction, reinforced this model. In Gandhi’s view, a woman’s role was to maintain the sanctity of the ‘home’. This ideal woman was distinguished from the “common woman”, often seen as promiscuous or coarse, representing ‘lower’ caste and lower class women, such as street vendors and sex workers.

In post-independence India, this idea of the family continued to dominate. The newly independent state emphasised the sanctity of the hetero-patriarchal family as essential for social stability. Civil codes were framed to maintain this sanctity. The family, founded upon the marriage of a heterosexual male and a heterosexual female, conferred a “bouquet of rights” (to quote the Supreme Court in the recent ‘Marriage Equality’ case) to the people. As such, in elevating these ideals of family life, alternative and heterogenous forms of copulation and marriage, and heterogenous notions of masculinity and femininity found in various castes, tribes and communities in India, were relegated to the margins.

If the family was sacrosanct, and ideals were seen as static and normative, duties had to be defined for the constituting members of the family. Just like the woman’s role was defined as being the homemaker and the man’s role defined as the breadwinner, the parent-children relationship had to be one founded upon ‘respect’ for the elder. Discussions about sexuality that unsettles the ideal family life had to be repressed. Discussions on deviant sexualities and copulation – homosexuality, incest, ‘love marriages’ – needed to be policed because they challenged the upper caste morals of the ideal family and the consequent property and caste relations that emerged out of it.

However, changes in political economy primarily in the post-liberalisation period, and challenges from the LGBTQIA+ groups and women’s rights activists meant that the sanctity was far from being unchallenged. As the economy evolved and more middle-class women began working, the traditional values of family and gender were perceived to be threatened by the cultural nationalists. We find similar responses when governments mandated sex education in India. These changes were seen as a threat to the moral fabric of Indian society.

Why the outrage on incest but not on misogyny or homophobia?

In today’s India, the cultural nationalists, represented by the Hindutva Right, have become the self-righteous preservers of the familial imagination of the late 19th and early 20th century. This is also reflected in the recent attempts by the current regime to oppose the marriage equality case in the Supreme Court, where it dubbed same-sex marriages as an “urban elite issue”. Similarly, in the context of marital rape, the BJP has vehemently opposed the criminalisation of marital rape with the argument that it destabilises the sanctity of marriage. Sections of the Congress have also opposed both marriage equality (for instance, the former Congress state government in Rajasthan) and criminalisation of marital rape.

The criticism of Allahbadia has to be located in this wider context and history of public morality, derived from the sanctity of a heterosexual monogamous patriarchal family. In addition to other supposed motives such as setting an example to bring in stringent laws against free speech, a primary motive in policing and going after Allahbadia, Raina and others, for the BJP, is to project and affirm its image as the preserver of public morality.

In India Got Latent, Raina and other panellists have often made problematic and offensive remarks towards women and LGBTQIA+ individuals. In one episode, for instance, Raina had asked a participant who identified as bisexual if she “feels something” when women security guards check her at the airport. While questions are being raised today on the “sexually explicit content” on his show from various corners, it took an Allahbadia-style comment on incest to attract public outrage. This is because neither misogyny nor homophobia destabilises the imagination of public morality founded upon the sanctity of the family.

Misogyny and homophobia are not aberrations, but the norm. Rape jokes, wife jokes and jokes about gay and trans people have been a part and parcel of our everyday life. Even before the Raina version of “dark comedy”, they have arrived in the form of the “non-veg jokes” of our fathers and uncles. They affirm patriarchy and heteronormativity, as both these systems of power rely on the vilification and marginalisation of women and sexual minorities. Incest, or the mere act of making a stupid, unfunny statement involving incest, however, unsettles our imagination of the sacred – the institution of the family which we have been fed through our culture, state and the media. It disrupts the sanctity of our national, legal, cultural and social institutions.

Tridib Mukherjee is a PhD scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati.

‘Dirty’, ‘Obscene’, ‘Insulting Parents’: SC Gives Ranveer Allahbadia Relief, But Only After Severe Remarks

‘”If this is not obscenity, then what is obscenity?’

New Delhi: The Supreme Court today (February 18) granted YouTuber Ranveer Allahbadia protection from arrest in cases registered against him in three cities over comments made by him on a comedy show – but not before making severe remarks on the nature of his jokes.

A bench of Justices Surya Kant and N. Kotiswar Singh passed the interim order while issuing notice to the respondents on the writ petition filed by Allahbadia against the multiple first information reports against him, LiveLaw reported.

The apex court also barred more FIRs from being registered on the same show, India’s Got Latent.

The interim protection will apply only if Allahbadia joins the investigation. The bench also allowed to him approach police for protection against threats.

Allahbadia, who has a podcast show under his moniker ‘Beer Biceps’, has been on the receiving end of threats, outrage and FIRs since he made a controversial comment on the YouTube show.

He asked a contestant, “Would you rather watch your parents have sex every day or join them to finish it once and for all?”. Other comments made by Allahbadia and others on the show including Samay Raina, Ashish Chanchlani, Jaspreet Singh and Apoorva Mukhija, have also been shared in the form of clips – drawing further criticism.

The backlash has led to many noting that this is hardly the first time that vulgarity has made it to Indian television. Many observed that Allahbadia was drawing criticism from the same people who had praised his interviews with government ministers and leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Supreme Court appeared not to be a fan of him today.

“Are you defending the kind of language?” Justice Kant asked advocate Abhinav Chandrachud, who was representing Allahbadia.

Chandrachud, who is the son of the former Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud, said that while he was “disgusted” by the comments, they could not be considered a criminal offence.

“If this is not obscenity, then what is obscenity? Is the judgment [in the Apoorva Arora case that Chandrachud cited] a licence to say whatever you want?”, Justice Kant asked.

Justice Kant made a number of comments on the joke.

“There is something very dirty in his mind, which has been vomited by him in the programme…He is insulting parents also. Why should the courts favour him?” Justice Kant asked.

The judge also appeared to rebuke Chandrachud who said that BJP leader Nupur Sharma had been given relief for a “much worse” statement – on the Prophet Muhammad.

“If you can try to attain cheap publicity by saying these kind of things, there might be others also who might want to get cheap publicity by making threats,” Justice Kant said.

“The words which you have used, parents will feel shamed. Sisters and daughters will feel ashamed. Entire society will feel shamed. It shows a perverted mind,” Justice Kant also said, according to LiveLaw.

Justice Kant also expressed disapproval of Chandrachud going to the police station. When Chandrachud said even Allahbadia’s mother was receiving death threats, Kant was enraged.

“What embarrassment he has caused to parents! We know from where he has copied the question. There are certain societies where they warn those who are not supposed to watch the program…they maintain precautions…” he said.

Why the Importance of ‘Nemat Khana’ in Urdu Literature Can’t Be Overstated

Khalid Jawed’s work not only expands the themes of contemporary Urdu fiction but also challenges its usual storytelling methods.

Khalid Jawed is now one of the most singular and incisive voices in contemporary Urdu fiction. His oeuvre is characterised by an unrelenting interrogation of violence, alienation, corporeality and the grotesque, through a narrative style that is at once unsettling and introspective.

His seminal novel, Nemat Khana (The Paradise of Food), which was awarded the JCB Prize for Literature in 2022 in its English translation by Baran Farooqi, epitomises this literary vision with great depth. The novel’s thematic architecture foregrounds the entanglement of the corporeal and the existential, situating the human body as both a site of suffering and a metaphor for broader socio-historical anxieties.

‘Nemat Khana,’ the Urdu edition, Khalid Jawed, Kitabdaar, 2023.

Through a prose style that is at once visceral and allegorical, Jawed constructs a literary universe where the grotesque serves not merely as an aesthetic device. It doubles as an epistemic framework for understanding the disquieting undercurrents of contemporary existence.

One of the most striking dimensions of Nemat Khana lies in its intricate and unsettling engagement with food – not merely as a vehicle of sustenance but as a metaphor for desire, violence and existential precarity.

The narrative unfolds through the consciousness of its protagonist, a lower-middle-class Muslim man, whose lived experiences are rendered through a prism of fragmentation, grotesquerie and an overarching sense of estrangement. In this epistemic framework, food assumes an ambivalent semiotic charge: it is simultaneously a locus of solace and a vector of horror, a liminal site where the primal imperatives of survival, sensuous gratification and visceral repulsion coalesce.

وہ اکیلا نہیں تھا،اُس کے ساتھ دو نفس اور بھی تھے ، ایک کن کٹا اور لنگڑاتا ہوا خرگوش کا سایہ جو اُس کے پیچھے پیچھے تھا اور ایک کاکروچ تھا جو اُس کی قمیض کے کالر پر تتلی کی طرح بیٹھا ہوا تھا(جاوید-38)

[He was not alone; he had two more beings with him—one was the shadow of a lop-eared and limping rabbit that followed him closely, and the other was a cockroach perched on his shirt collar like a butterfly.]

This above passage from the novel is imbued with profound complexity, and lives between the real and the phantasmagoric.

The lop-eared, limping rabbit stands for vulnerability, corporeal affliction and existential precarity. The deformity and impairment of the rabbit underscore a rupture in its autonomy, rendering it an emblem of suffering and spiritual debilitation. Yet, it is not the corporeal entity of the rabbit that assumes primacy in the narrative, but rather its shadow – an absence that signifies presence.

This spectral displacement problematises the notion of agency, gesturing towards a subjectivity haunted by the vestiges of an ineffable trauma.

The cockroach, universally associated with resilience and survival in harsh conditions, is reinterpreted through its placement on the protagonist’s collar. This contrasts sharply with the traditional symbolism of a butterfly, which represents beauty and transcendence. By replacing the butterfly with a cockroach – an insect often linked to filth and revulsion – the image creates a striking dissonance. This contrast challenges conventional meanings, blurring the lines between beauty and ugliness, truth and deception, and highlighting the struggle to endure in oppressive conditions.

The protagonist’s interactions with these liminal entities – neither wholly tangible nor entirely illusory – blur the line between reality and hallucination, creating a sense of psychological fragmentation. Their interstitial nature reinforces themes of isolation, existential alienation, and hidden trauma or guilt, which emerge as unsettling visions. This interplay between the physical and the ghostly, presence and absence, highlights the fragility of perception and the thin boundary between sanity and breakdown.

Khalid Jawed’s style eschews any banal conceptualisation of eating. Rather, alimentary acts surrounding food and consumption are tied to themes of decay, death, and corporeal limitations. The novel’s unrelenting preoccupation on the physical experience of eating places it within the grotesque literary tradition, wherein the ostensibly familiar is rendered disturbingly alien, and the mundane is imbued with an abject, almost sublime, materiality.

In Nemat Khana, violence is complex and layered, unfolding across the physical, psychological, and existential registers. The novel rejects a linear narrative, instead using a fragmented, episodic story-telling mode that reflects the protagonist’s fractured mind and struggles within an opaque and adversarial social order.

Also read: ‘The Paradise of Food’ Is a Sordid Saga of Onions and Garlic, Liver and Lungs, and Lust

This disjointed storytelling isn’t just an aesthetic device – it heightens the protagonist’s sense of disorientation and emphasises how personal suffering is deeply tied to broader social and political violence. Themes of family, community, and identity become battlegrounds where the protagonist faces oppression and marginalisation. Nemat Khana doesn’t just portray violence; it embeds it within its very form, language, and tone, forcing the reader to confront the fundamental precarity of human existence.

The book’s literary sensibility is at once bleak and profoundly poetic.

Khalid Jawed orchestrates a narrative universe where meaning is persistently deferred, survival is configured through absurdity, and the corporeal realm emerges as a site of perpetual conflict.

The novel does not merely depict alienation; rather, it enacts alienation as a formal principle. It is a singular intervention in contemporary Urdu fiction, exemplifying Jawed’s radical aesthetic vision – one that eschews facile categorisation.

Jawed’s prose is replete with intricate metaphorical constructions and disconcerting imagistic configurations. It oscillates between the registers of poetry and prose, and is thus at once hypnotic and profoundly unsettling.

By deploying a first-person narrative, he submerges the reader in an intimate yet deeply perturbing engagement with his existential crises, corporeal abjection, and metaphysical anguish. The immediacy amplifies the novel’s affective intensity.

The structural architecture of Nemat Khana constitutes a radical departure from conventional realist paradigms as well.

Jawed is thus aligned with modernist and postmodernist literary traditions, particularly in his dismantling of the illusion of narrative coherence. His prose resists syntactic and structural predictability. The novel thus unfolds not as a causally ordered sequence but as a series of encounters – each one amplifying the protagonist’s entrapment within a real and imagined world.

Critical discourse frequently positions Khalid Jawed’s oeuvre within the broader lineage of existential and avant-garde literature, drawing compelling parallels with Franz Kafka, William Burroughs, and Samuel Beckett. Much like Kafka, Jawed constructs a universe governed by an inscrutable logic, wherein the protagonist’s alienation is exacerbated by a terrain that offers neither clarity nor solace.

It is comparable to the aesthetic of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, wherein the body becomes a locus of simultaneous fascination and horror.

Within the broader corpus of Urdu fiction, Jawed’s literary praxis moves away from the social realism of the works of Premchand, Ismat Chughtai, and Rajinder Singh Bedi. While their concerns are indispensable, Jawed’s fiction eschews direct sociopolitical critique in favour of a deeper engagement. His oeuvre extends the experimental impulses of Naiyar Masud’s narrative structures and the psychological interiority of Qurratulain Hyder’s historiographic imagination. His world is one where corporeality, semiotics, and violence coalesce into meaning and negation.

In a contemporary Urdu literary milieu oscillating between nostalgic lamentations and overt political allegories, Nemat Khana emerges as rupture. It reinvents the Urdu novel.

At its core, Nemat Khana creates a literary style that is unsettling and intellectually complex. His work not only expands the themes of contemporary Urdu fiction but also challenges its usual storytelling methods. This commitment to challenging norms and pushing intellectual boundaries makes him one of the most important literary voices of the 21st century.

Meraj Rana is an Urdu poet and critic. He teaches Urdu literature in the Department of Urdu, Halim Muslim P.G. College, Kanpur. His first collection, Panahgah was published by the Sahitya Academy, New Delhi.

‘Extra-Constitutional’, ‘Fascist Tendency’: Govt’s ‘Block’ on Vikatan Website Sparks Outrage

Critics argue that the alleged involvement of a BJP leader in initiating the block also shows the troubling overlap between political interests and state power.

Chennai: The Government of India move to allegedly block access to the website of the Vikatan group has brought condemnation from the political opposition and journalists’ bodies. The action – taken without prior notice or official explanation – has sparked widespread outrage, with many seeing it as a blatant attempt to silence critical journalism. The measure targets a publication group with a legacy of a century.

The website became inaccessible soon after the Tamil Nadu cadre of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took exception to a cartoon published by its digital magazine earlier this week. The cartoon, published on February 10, showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi sitting shackled next to US President Donald Trump.

Condemning the move, Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin stated, “The action against the century-old Vikatan media group is a direct assault on press freedom and democracy. Such arbitrary censorship cannot be tolerated in a democratic society.”

Speaking to The Wire, N. Ram, eminent journalist and director of The Hindu group, also voiced strong criticism. “What they have done is utterly illegal and deeply concerning. Numerous readers have independently complained that quite of a sudden they could not get access to Vikatan’s website, www.vikatan.com. It was clear that the Union government was behind this traffic outage and that its arbitrary actions were linked to a cartoon published by the Vikatan group’s digital-only publication, Vikatan Plus, which is available only to paid subscribers. The cartoon appeared on February 10, before Prime Minister Modi’s two-day visit to the United States and meeting with US President Donald Trump. It related to the Indian government’s, and the prime minister’s, conspicuous silence over the US government’s inhumane treatment of Indian citizens who had been handcuffed and chained during the long flight on a US military plane,” he said.

“As editorial comment and satire, the cartoon was perfectly legitimate journalism — it was a symbolic depiction of the prime minister’s hands being tied as he sat for talks with Trump at the White House,” Ram continued.

The cartoon struck a chord with readers, gaining traction on social media, but also reportedly provoked backlash from the ruling BJP. Tamil Nadu BJP president K. Annamalai has lodged a complaint with the Press Council of India (PCI) and the minister of state for information and broadcasting, L. Murugan, seeking action against the website over the cartoon. In his complaint, Annamalai alleged that the cartoon was a deliberate attempt to undermine the diplomatic importance of Modi’s visit to the US and to appease the DMK government in Tamil Nadu. He argued that the depiction violated journalistic ethics and called on the ministry to take appropriate action against the publication.

Also read: When Journalists Are Jailed, It’s Not Just the Press That Suffers

Meanwhile, the Vikatan group issued a statement acknowledging reports of access issues. “There are numerous reports stating that the Vikatan website has been blocked by the central government. Many users from different locations have reported that they are unable to access the Vikatan website. However, as of now, there has been no official announcement from the central government regarding the blocking of the Vikatan website,” the statement read. Vikatan confirmed that the February 10 Vikatan Plus cover cartoon had faced criticism from BJP supporters. The publication also noted that “For nearly a century, Vikatan has stood firmly in support of freedom of expression. We have always operated with the principle of upholding free speech and will continue to do so. The editorial team is currently seeking clarity on the reasons behind the website’s inaccessibility and is in the process of taking up the matter with the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.”

Raising serious concerns about the legality and transparency of the government’s action, Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi’s member of parliament D. Ravikumar has written to Union minister for electronics and information technology Ashwini Vaishnaw, urging immediate intervention. “In this instance, Vikatan has not been informed of any alleged violation, nor has it received a copy of the blocking order, thereby violating principles of natural justice and due process. Such opacity undermines the rule of law and sets a dangerous precedent for arbitrary executive action. Blocking the Vikatan website without justification has a chilling effect on legitimate journalism and stifles democratic discourse,” he wrote. Ravikumar further urged the government to clarify whether a blocking order was issued, restore access if blocked, and ensure strict adherence to Section 69A of the IT Act, which requires that no content is restricted without providing written reasons and an opportunity to appeal. He also called on the government to uphold transparency by publishing blocking orders, with necessary redactions for security concerns, to foster public accountability.

N. Ram cited a historical parallel, drawing on the Vikatan’s own history. “In 1987, Ananda Vikatan’s bold and versatile editor-proprietor, my friend S. Balasubramanian, published a reader-generated cartoon depicting some MLAs as knaves, thieves, etc. Balan was jailed for two days and then released in the face of a spirited journalists’ protest. Subsequently, the Madras high court ruled the arrest unconstitutional, striking a significant blow for freedom of speech and expression and for media freedom. That judgment remains a landmark. This time, the circumstances are of course different but the issue remains the same — censorship and the arbitrary and unlawful suppression of free speech. Five days after the cartoon’s publication, Tamil Nadu BJP president K. Annamalai escalated the matter to Union minister L. Murugan. Instead of due process – a formal blocking order, notice to the publisher, or legal justification under Article 19(2)’s provisions for reasonable restrictions by statute under eight heads – access to Vikatan’s entire website was, in effect, blocked for many thousands of users, subscribers and free readers alike. No statute was cited; no procedure followed. The opaque, extra-constitutional move reeks of vendetta against a century-old, widely respected news media group that is unafraid to criticise and question those in power.”

The Vikatan group, established in 1926, holds a distinguished place in Tamil journalism. The sudden and unexplained blocking of their digital presence has raised alarms about escalating state censorship and the shrinking space for dissent in India’s digital sphere.

The action has sparked criticism from various quarters. Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), a prominent political party in Tamil Nadu, described the government’s action as a “fascist tendency” that reveals an intolerance toward legitimate criticism. Journalists’ collectives including the Chennai Press Club and civil rights organisations have also decried the move, warning that it represents a dangerous precedent where political pressure can dictate government censorship of the media.

Ram further emphasised the unprecedented nature of the digital blockade: “This is not a simple blocking move. By degrading and preventing access to digital news content through non-transparent ‘dirty tricks’ technical manoeuvres, it subverts media freedom and reader’s right to information. This arbitrary action, utterly devoid of legality, has wide implications for the media sector.”

Also read: When Cartoonists Are Censored, We All Need To Be Concerned

Ram added that on February 16, after technical censorship had been set in motion and the damage had been done, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting sent a notice to the Vikatan group.

The notice states that the ministry had “received a request for blocking of certain content” published at a website affiliated with Vikatan; that a “meeting of the Inter-Departmental Committee constituted under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021” was scheduled for February 17; and that Vikatan could “appear and submit its comments/clarifications, if any, before the Committee.”

Ram commented that it was a case of “Sentence first, verdict afterwards” – a reference to the impatient declaration by the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Critics argue that the alleged involvement of a BJP leader in initiating the block also shows the troubling overlap between political interests and state power. As Ram points out, this has been done through “extra-constitutional channels”.

In response to the growing outrage, media rights organisations and political parties have called for the immediate restoration of access to the Vikatan website. Ram further added, ” This shows that it is possible to hamstring the digital operations of any news provider one dislikes. They may deny this in court, but if so, the unbelievable coincidence of lakhs of readers losing access will be hard to explain.”

Kavitha Muralidharan is an independent journalist.

Arati Kadav’s ‘Mrs.’ Can’t Replicate ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’s’ Viscerality

Ultimately, it remains a low stakes film, not willing to take the risks of the original.

Arati Kadav’s Mrs. – an official remake of Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) – is a technically sound film. It opens with a montage of delicacies being cooked in an average Indian kitchen. Editor Prerna Saigal cuts the meticulous preparation of each dish with a carefully choreographed piece, drawing our attention to the ‘dance’ most women have to endure inside a household, to keep it on its axis. Scored by Sagar Desai featuring sounds from everyday life (like squeaky, rusted gate offering rhythm to the track), the montage works well. But it can’t quite conjure the rhythm of Baby’s original film, which editor Francis Louis establishes in the never-ending loop of domestic labour thrust upon women. Especially inside a kitchen.

A still from Mrs. Photo: Screengrab from video.

Kadav, who broke out with imaginative Sci-Fi films (The Astronaut and His Parrot) using wide-eyed imagination to compensate for oppressive budgets, also constructs her latest venture with a similar amount of distance. The food photography is immaculate, the kitchen and the home look like they were built on a soundstage. Unlike Baby’s film, where both the kitchen as well as the home felt lived-in. When Richa (Sanya Malhotra) has to immerse her hand into a clogged sink to weed out the sediments at its bottom, it doesn’t feel as viscerally icky as Nimisha Vijayan’s character having to hand-pick the chewed-out bones thrown by her father-in-law and the husband, in the original film.

The Great Indian Kitchen did a sensational job of dispassionately recording the indignities the women in an Indian home have to suffer under the weight of their ‘duties’. Kadav’s film tries to replicate the same, but isn’t able to do so with a guttural intensity. What was affecting about Baby’s film is how casually the men of the family invisibilise the women’s work and by extension their identity as human beings – with thoughts, preferences, considerations.

A still from Mrs. Photo: Screengrab from video.

For a long time, I couldn’t even tell if Kadav’s film was set in Delhi or Mumbai or any other Indian city. Sanya Malhotra’s character appears to be dressed like a Maharashtrian bride in the film’s opening stretch, but then a character mentions Kamani auditorium, which indicates the film is set in Delhi. The original film has a crucial plot point involving the daughter-in-law voicing her dissent against the Supreme Court ruling barring women from entering the Sabarimala temple (because menstruation makes them ‘impure’). Kadav’s film swaps this for the low-stakes story of Richa bringing ‘shame’ on the family with her dance troupe’s YouTube channel. It’s a feeble, corporate-tested, diluted alternative, compared to the original.

Remakes usually require a new perspective, or some bold insights to keep things fresh for even those who have seen the original. Mrs. is the kind of faithful, strained remake that only wants to exploit the popularity of the original film, without raising the stakes for itself.

A word about Nishant Dahiya, who plays Richa’s husband as a two-dimensional ‘nice guy’ — it’s almost painful to watch, compared to Suraj Venjaramoodu – whose misogyny hides in plain sight, until his wife playfully calls out his ‘good manners’ in a restaurant. It’s a superbly tense scene in the original film, where the tone changes from fairytale to a hyper-realistic relationship drama.

A still from Mrs. Photo: Screengrab from video.

Kadav’s film seems to replicate the beats of a wedding film in the beginning, never quite shifting gears to the dystopian reality of a casteist Indian household that discriminates against a menstruating member of their family. Kanwaljit Singh, usually tasked with playing the ‘cool’ father/father-in-law character, is an interesting casting choice. Playing a rigid patriarch, who doesn’t compromise on the slightest of things, Singh brings a softness to the mundane cruelty he inflicts on the planets around him, while himself acting as the centre of the family’s universe. Unfortunately, even his character is plagued with a generic personality, never digging for deeper reasons behind why he’s like this.

Sanya Malhotra, a fine actor who can sail through terrible films with her spunk alone, can’t rise above the script’s lack of ambition. Who is Richa beyond her domestic duties and her love for dance – we hardly find out. What makes her angry, except the garden-variety sexism on display in her in-laws home? We never know. There’s a nice little dialogue about people (especially Indian women) being ‘prime numbers’, only divisible by themselves – that feels wasted in this underachieving film. Having said that, Malhotra does nail this one scene where she confronts her husband’s advances for being so inconsiderate about her own sexual pleasures.

As a remake, Mrs. should’ve aimed higher and taken more risks. Kadav’s talents are wasted in a film that ties both her hands, and then expects a culturally distinguishable film. As for Malhotra rising up against patriarchy, another film already made stellar use of her easy presence: Pagglait (2021).

*Mrs. is currently streaming on Zee5.

Vikatan Website ‘Inaccessible’ Hours After BJP Complaint About Modi-Trump Cartoon

The cartoon showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi sitting shackled next to US President Donald Trump.

New Delhi: Tamil media group Vikatan’s website was reportedly inaccessible hours after the Tamil Nadu cadre of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took exception to a cartoon published by its digital magazine earlier this week.

The cartoon, published on February 10, showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi sitting shackled next to US President Donald Trump.

While the media group said it had not received any communication from the Union government over its website being blocked, several users on X said that they were unable to access the website.

The media group’s official statement noted that the cartoon, about the mistreatment of Indian deportees by US authorities, had drawn criticism from the saffron party’s supporters, including the Tamil Nadu president of the BJP.

“There have been numerous reports stating that the Vikatan website has been blocked by the central government. Many users from different locations have reported that they are unable to access the Vikatan website. However, as of now, there has been no official announcement from the central government regarding the blocking of the Vikatan website,” Vikatan said in an official statement.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi sitting shackled next to US President Donald Trump. Photo: X/@anusharavi10

“This cartoon was criticised by BJP supporters and [the] BJP state president. Annamalai reportedly lodged a complaint against Vikatan with the central government.

For nearly a century, Vikatan has stood firmly in support of freedom of expression. We have always operated with the principle of upholding free speech and will continue to do so. We are still trying to ascertain the reasons behind the blocking of our website, and are in the process of taking up this matter with the ministry,” the statement added.

Condemning the alleged blocking, Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin in a post on X, said, “Blocking the media for expressing opinions is not good for democracy! This is an example of the fascist nature of the BJP. I request immediate permission to grant access to the blocked website.”

Musk’s Task Was to Take a Measure of Modi

From the Vishwaguru Archives: This is a transcript of a briefing given by a senior Musk associate on the meeting between the Indian Prime Minister and Elon Musk. The briefing was on deep-deep-deep background, i.e. no one is permitted to even acknowledge, leave alone, cite, the conversation.

This is a work of fiction. Although it may appear closer to reality than fiction for some.

As you know, the Indian Prime Minister, Hon’ble Narendra Modi, was in America for an official meeting with President Donald Trump. During their personal meeting, the prime minister complimented the president for relying on the help and advice of his very, very rich friends. The prime minister told the president that for some 20 years now, he has benefited from helping and being helped by rich people. In a light-hearted vein, the prime minister shared with the president how liberals in India like to call his rich friends “obscenely wealthy” but like Trump, he has never cared for public opinion.

It was at this stage that the president suggested that Mr. Modi have a chat with Mr. Musk. For good measure, the president warned that if the prime minister left Washington without calling on Mr. Musk, his good friend would not be pleased. “And, I cannot have El getting annoyed. So, do yourself a favour and meet him.”

So it should be clearly understood that neither the Indian prime minister nor Mr. Musk sought the meeting. It was suggested by the US president and, to quote that old line from The Godfather, it was an offer Mr. Modi could not refuse. Mr. Musk’s only condition was that it would a delegation level meeting; now that he is part of the US government, he is rather leery of having any informal confabulations with government heads.

The Musk establishment is pleased to note that the Indian prime minister brought his senior most advisers to the meeting. Mr. Musk’s ‘delegation’ consisted of his three children, each of whom was duly profiled by the pro-government Indian media. Our attention has been drawn to considerable sniggering back in India about the presence of the three children. Some have asked why Modi asked his foreign minister and NSA to be present when their US counterparts were not there. This is not fair. At least one of the senior Indian officials tried to make some baby-talk with the Musk children while another minuted the exchange.

All told, this was a brief meeting. Mr. Musk was pressed for time, as he had promised to take the kids out for a spin around town. He told the Indian prime minister that his people should feel free to put out whatever statement they wanted; because as far as he was concerned, his only priority was that his meeting had taken place in full public glare.

It is our understanding that as and when Mr. Musk wants to take his business to India, he would do so on his terms and time. And, I think, after today’s meeting this much will also be clear to the Indian prime minister. Many people around the world have concluded that President Trump makes a tough negotiator; soon they will discover, as hopefully Mr. Modi did, that Mr. Musk makes the president look mild.

Today, Mr. Musk is not just an entrepreneur, he has the might of the New American Deep State behind him. Except Mr. Xi in China, there is no leader in any part of the world who would want to take – to use a colourful Indian phrase – panga with him. And, Mr. Modi and his friends make a very, very vulnerable lot. Many Indian think-tankers imagine that the Indian diaspora wields a lot of clout in Washington. But for them and all Indian-origin citizens, we have one word: ‘Normalize‘.

In our reckoning, Gautam Adani is the only smart Indian. He hires the smartest of our legal people; he engages lobbyists who deftly play the oldest game Washington knows – how to spend money on the Hill. Both Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump admire those businessmen, at home and abroad, who know how to own politicians, bureaucrats, judges, and journalists. Neither President Trump nor Mr. Musk is hung up on this “integrity” business. For Mr. Modi this is familiar terrain and we are sure he has also absorbed the new mood in Washington.

It is our belief that very brief meeting the Indian prime minister had with Mr. Musk will turn out to be most consequential. As the authorized enforcer of presidential authority in Washington, Mr. Musk is required to size up world leaders who come calling at the White House. We are glad we had an early opportunity to take a measure of Mr. Modi.