When daily reports and graphs in this newspaper are highlighting the hardships faced by different sectors and geographies due to COVID-19, we were hardly expecting a slip-up on a cartoon. But on March 26, some readers took serious exception to a cartoon by Deepak Harichandan. The attire given to the virus was seen as reinforcing stereotypes and perpetuating social prejudices. Readers reached out through e-mails and social media posts. There were arguments about interpretations of symbols and representations. How did the newspaper address the concerns of these readers? The Hindu modified the cartoon for its Internet edition with a note from the Editor.
Blurry lines
While it is easy to evaluate text, it is not so with images. There are vexatious ethical questions which do not have ready answers: do people have the right to free speech even if they hold offensive and hurtful opinions? What are the limits? Who draws the red lines, the frontiers of tolerance? While the lines for reportage and analysis are stringent, there is an element of fluidity when it comes to cartooning. Readers may wonder why we give more leeway to cartoons.
The U.S. Library of Congress listed five persuasive techniques used by cartoonists to effectively tell their story or critique: symbolism, exaggeration, labelling, analogy, and irony. I also remember Winston Churchill’s praise for the cartoonist David Low and Jawaharlal Nehru’s plea to Shankar (Keshav Shankar Pillai) following the cartoonists’ pungent criticism of the leaders of the U.K. and India, respectively. “Low is the Charlie Chaplin of caricature, and tragedy and comedy are the same to him,” wrote Churchill. When Shankar launched the magazine Shankar’s Weekly in 1948, Nehru told him, “Don’t spare me, Shankar. Hit, hit me hard.”
The irony of cartooning was succinctly captured by one of the finest writers and cartoonists of independent India, O.V. Vijayan: “It is an unutterable sadness which punctuates the reality that I am called upon to portray, and yet the dominant superstition of my profession demands that I raise a laugh.” Cartoonists are supposed to use humour to criticise authoritarianism, fearlessly question those in power, and provoke people to react against injustice. Right from the days of the first-known political cartoon, ‘Join, or die’, attributed to Benjamin Franklin and published in the Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754, cartoons have retained elements of grotesque and wanton distortions.
Modifying the cartoon
It is against this backdrop that we evaluated the complaints against the cartoon by Mr. Harichandan on COVID-19’s attempt to hold planet Earth to ransom. When the focus of attention became the attire and not the message, the original purpose of the cartoon was lost. The Editor asked the cartoonist to modify the cartoon to remove specific symbolic associations. Online readers of the newspaper would have seen a modified version of the cartoon on the website, with a note from the Editor: “Some readers have objected to the cartoon published on March 26, 2020 as Islamophobic. Any link to Muslims in the attire of the virus was completely unintentional. The point of the cartoon was to show the world being taken hostage by the virus. However, we agree that the virus should have been shown as just a blob or a stick figure and we express our regret for the hurt or unhappiness caused. Accordingly, we are taking down this cartoon online and replacing it with one that has a neutral representation of the attire.”
When the intention and meaning of the cartoon was explained in plain words and the cartoon was modified to have neutral representation, the newspaper faced a second round of attack, this time saying that it had succumbed to “unedifying self-censorship”.
In a polarised environment, we need to understand the distinction between an act of course correction and self-censorship. Some decisions in newspapers are made instinctively. Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who published controversial cartoons, reflected on the nature of the trade in a 2016 interview to The Atlantic: “As a journalist, as an editor, you do a lot of things based on instincts. … And when it all exploded I had to wind back the movie and find out why did I think this was the right thing to do.”
The idea of a political cartoon is to provoke readers to think and act, and not to be divisive. Hence, the act of modifying the cartoon is a result of editorial judgement.
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
