One man’s insult is another man’s joke and vice versa. Today, punishing the “insult” using state machinery is par for the course. Someone has to name something as insulting—a song, a comedian’s one-liner, a poster, a cartoon, a painting, a book, a slogan, a short skirt or a bare shouldered Rakhi dress, or a photograph of a pothole. A complaint by an unheard-of-person is filed and the police register an FIR. This raises a puzzling question: what exactly defines an “insult”? A song may be enjoyed by 10 million people but condemned by just a hundred; if that hundred is connected to power, they become the legal representation of “public sentiment”. Lo and behold the democracy of manufactured outrage: one person’s feeling of offence acquires the force of an un-consulted million people’s opinion without ever being put to vote.
A jewellery company was forced to withdraw an ad showing a sister wearing a bralette because it “insulted” Indian tradition. The same had happened some years ago. The ads were dropped not because the company or the ad agency thought they were “insulting”, but simply feared goons ransacking their stores and beating up their employees. Ideally, an insult should require something more substantial than somebody saying, “I was offended.” Offence can touch the realms of the ridiculous; there was an attempt to cover up the Mohenjo-daro dancing girl in déshabillé because nudity is against Indian culture. Fortunately, it was promptly unclothed by sensible officials. The pertinent question here is not the “insult”. Who exactly is the injured party? Do they have a name? What makes them the guardians of our mores? Who speaks for them? How many people must feel insulted before the “insult” becomes legally actionable? Ten? Ten thousand? A hundred people shouting outside a police station? A WhatsApp group? A political organisation? A religious body? A minister? A bureaucrat? A godi media anchor? Then there is another problem. How does one impartially prove an “insult”? If I say, “That joke insulted me,” the injury is my interpretation. Of course, governments get offended themselves if they believe I have “insulted” any leader, for example in this column. The sarkar has police stations, prosecutors, regulatory authorities, universities, licensing powers, and the capacity to restrict my liberty. Is there an invisible line between legitimate criticism and “insult”? Ah. You discover it only after crossing it. A law does not need to imprison thousands to control speech, but only to make them wonder whether they might be next in jail for cracking a joke. The most efficient censorship is not necessarily to ban all “insults”, but forcing citizens to censor themselves. “Insult” converts disagreement into injury and criticism into aggression. Perhaps the real insult is not the photograph of a school without walls and a toilet full of shit; it is the fact that the photograph reflects the truth. The “insult” is not the comedian’s joke, but that the audience laughed. Once people understand that the price of saying the “wrong thing” may be a police case, an arrest, a summons, mob fury, a cancelled event or a career put on pause, they don’t need to be told what not to say: instead they learn to become careful and polite and silent. But they are seething inside.
For the older political culture, ridicule was often something delivered from a stage, in a newspaper cartoon or a satirical magazine. It had a beginning and an end. A cartoon appeared in the morning paper and became a paper bag for fish the next morning. But now the satire is back in public because Gen Z has weaponised the “insult” with memes. The censor can get YouTube to remove the post, but Gen Z has already made a million copies to upload immediately. The “insult” becomes funnier because somebody tries to ban it. Censorship has become advertising for itself. Youth are dismantling power now, not through manifestos but by simply making power look ridiculous. The emperor is not physically undressed. He is meme-dressed and millions laugh. Political humour has historically punctured the inflated certainty of authority: “We see what you are doing and we are not frightened.” Insult has become the fifth pillar of democracy. When governments, institutions, and powerful individuals invoke “insult” as a reason to suppress expression, they are not protecting “hurt feelings” of nameless goons. They are attempting to establish who gets to define permissible ridicule. A system that cannot tolerate being laughed at may eventually discover that the laughter is not the insult until it is too late. The demand for obedient silence is deemed by Gen Z an insult to its intelligence. No amount of gerrymandering will change that.