Duty to laugh

A Madras High Court judge’s suggestion to amend the Constitution mandating that every citizen also has a duty to laugh comes as a whiff of fresh air — something the country has been gasping for, of late. Justice GR Swaminathan of the Madurai Bench has a remarkably refined sense of humour, but in quashing an FIR against a man arrested for an innocuous social media post, his insightful observations only highlight the idiocy and absurdity that surround the growth and normalisation of the offence-taking tribe. Written from the perspective of cartoonists and satirists, the judgment draws attention to how what ought to be a reasonable understanding of a situation is increasingly being influenced by impulses that border on the irrational and amount to an abuse of the legal process.

The petitioner, a CPI-ML leader, tried tongue-in-cheek wordplay while captioning photographs after a sight-seeing trip with family: ‘Trip to Sirumalai for shooting practice’. For the police, it appeared as a threat to wage war, though the Judicial Magistrate refused remand. ‘Laugh at what?’ is a serious question, the judge said, using the ‘holy cow’ as a metaphor, which varies from person to person, region to region. ‘A real cow, even if terribly emaciated, shall be holy in Yogi’s terrain. In West Bengal, Tagore is such an iconic figure that Khushwant Singh learnt the lesson at some cost. In Tamil Desh, the all-time iconoclast Periyar is a super-holy cow. In Kerala, Marx and Lenin are beyond criticism or satire. Shivaji and Savarkar enjoy a similar immunity in Maharashtra,’ he wrote. And topped it off with what should only attract a good laugh, but could make some see red too: all over India, however, ‘there is one ultimate holy cow and that is national security’.

Being funny is one thing, the judge righty states, and poking fun at another is different altogether. Those who have been at the receiving end for their attempt at humour can draw strength from the ruling, but then, a creative process facing combative opposition because of its very nature is anything but funny.