Kunal Kamra — and the Chokehold on India's Political Comedy It May Not Survive

'It doesn’t matter if you find Kunal Kamra’s jokes funny or not. Kamra's jokes are important,' writes Kunal Purohit.

Kunal Kamra’s jokes are important because they remind us of a truth so many have forgotten: Fear should never be allowed to triumph, if our democracy has to survive. With his courage, Kamra breaks the omerta.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

At the end of comic Kunal Kamra’s latest video is a line that captures the essence of political comedy in today’s India—he quotes Osho saying, “Life begins when fear ends.”

An outsider to the shenanigans of our New India might think of it as somewhat of a strange line to use to conclude a video of a comic set.  

It is only comedy, after all.

Yet, the events that unfolded in the 24 hours after his video was published on YouTube, underlined why that line was apt and necessary. 

Of the flurry of events that have occurred on Monday, 24 March, here is a summary: Legislators in Maharashtra—casting aside a crippling public debt and a farm crisis that sees seven farmers kill themselves on average each day—demanded that Kamra be arrested for treason, be hung upside down in public, and his face be blackened. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who has seldom shown such alacrity in reacting to hate speeches and communal violence, delivered a seven-minute-long statement in the state Assembly, saying that Kamra will face “the strictest” of legal actions.

Those in the know in Mumbai said Kamra faces imminent arrest. 

Comedy in India, for a while, has been the domain of the brave or the foolhardy, depending on your outlook. Being the subject of police FIRs isn’t new for India’s comics, but Monday’s events reveal that threshold has now been crossed. 

Political comedy, irrespective of which way this turns out, will now carry with it the risk of being the reason for comics to not merely face police complaints but be hounded by mobs egged on by the government itself. If it doesn’t like your jokes, the government can scrutinise your call records and even peep into your bank accounts, like Maharashtra's Minister of State for Home Yogesh Kadam has said it would. Finally, it could now also mean that if the government doesn’t approve, the venue of the show could face bulldozer justice, a form of retribution restricted only to Muslims so far.

It is the last fact that is the most significant: we are now at a point when political censorship is intersecting with the Hindutva playbook of meting out retributive justice to imagined enemies and casting them in the public eye as those who deserve not even a fig leaf of due process.

What does all this do to political comedy in the country? It places a chokehold on an art form that was fast running out of breath, anyway. 

The Final Frontier

There is a reason why stand-up comedy has faced such a barrage of visible attacks from the government over the last decade or so.

The Narendra Modi government and its Hindutva ecosystem have been successful in creating an impenetrable propaganda stream, across different mediums—from WhatsApp and social media content to television news. The ecosystem’s grip over all these forms is difficult to shake off. 

Where it hasn’t been successful in capturing the medium entirely to serve its messaging purposes, it has managed to find ways to use it to its advantage at least periodically. A prime example is the Hindi film industry with films that mirror Hindutva propaganda, be it films like The Kerala Story, The Kashmir Files, and more recently, Chhaava.

This is where political comedy becomes critical, as an alternative voice of dissent and criticism.

It is the space that stands out because it calls out the hypocrisies of our politicians, is unafraid to point to the blatant crony capitalism and offers a voice to the travails and frustrations of daily life, at a time when the media mostly no longer offers that space.

In addition, satirical comedy is the only space where the pro-government ecosystem has had little to no success in infiltrating and co-opting voices.

Even though it has relatively limited reach, it is a crucial art form because it reaches urban middle and upper-middle class masses in India’s urban centres. It also travels beyond the country’s borders, to the diaspora audiences. 

Which is why, the existence of critical political comedy in India is a dual-failure for the pro-government ecosystem: not only is it unable to sway comics its way, but it is also not able to diminish, entirely at least, the criticism that it gets from the few-remaining-but-influential comics.

New Red Lines

For a few years now, the narrow and dingy corridors of India’s comedy clubs have seen comics exchanging whispers with each other about the red lines they have drawn around their work: the leaders they won’t talk about, the subjects they will circumvent, and the causes they will pretend don’t exist. 

Some of these lines were drawn from the cues they picked up from the country’s political climate, others came from experiences they or fellow comics suffered.

In 2015, when All India Bakchod faced police complaints for their roast show, the AIB knockout, comics realised that abusive language and risque humour was a no-go.

Slowly, as the Modi government tightened its grip over dissenting voices, most comics took the cue and drew red lines around not wanting to be seen as “political” comics. Many, like Kamra, didn’t.

Then came the arrest of comics Munawar Faruqui, Nalin Yadav, and three others in 2021, after a Hindu right-wing mob claimed Faruqui’s jokes had insulted Hindu gods. Faruqui hadn’t begun his performance, but that didn’t stop the Madhya Pradesh police from jailing him for 35 days and Yadav for 57 days. Comics drew new red lines immediately after.

Many others had run-ins that were less dramatic but equally effective in silencing them; the comedy world is full of examples that comics quote to each other—the comics that are held as examples to learn from. 

Like the comic who was forced to apologise on video for a joke he cracked and then went into depression. It took him over five years to take the stage again but a part of him remains anxious, each time he takes the stage. Or others, who faced threats and intimidation on social media and gave up on their comedy dreams.

Monday’s events—when the State doubles up as the mob—not just reiterates existing lines but also serves to legitimise the act of taking offence, itself. 

Legitimising Offence

Kamra’s travails leave other comics even more susceptible to threats and intimidation from anyone else who might find their jokes offensive.

A Mumbai-based comic, known for his political comedy often critical of the Modi government, has been hounded by members of an influential religious community close to the ruling establishment for his jokes about them. Community members have created pages on social media, advocating his boycott and pressuring venues to cancel his upcoming shows. Those threats are only going to grow more raucous.

Many have also learnt the hard way that there is no escaping these threats. Political comics who have tried to do international tours in countries with significant diaspora members have seen pro-Modi supporters in those countries pressuring venues, getting their shows cancelled. 

Comics, watching what Kamra suffers, are also witnessing the demise of Mumbai’s most popular stand-up comedy venue, the Habitat. In a statement on Monday, the venue said it was “extremely broken” and was shutting down, at least temporarily. 

The demolition of the venue by Mumbai’s civic authorities, on instructions by Shiv Sena minister Pratap Sarnaik, has spooked the club even further.

Such retribution is going to have a similar ripple effect on other clubs across Mumbai and the country. Wary clubs might start distancing themselves from political comics and even deny them spaces. After all, which club wants to suffer marauding mobs and bulldozer justice? 

In the last couple of years, already, the pool of comics willing to be critical of the government has shrunk some more silently. Those who watch the industry closely have noticed the subtle changes in the rhetoric from some of these stars—less calling out of the government and the use of top leaders, more broad-brush strokes about the country’s politics.

Amidst this, Kamra’s act stood out defiantly for refusing to respect the red lines that his fellow comics have accepted, for asserting the right of every individual to speak their mind freely, for political satire to be unsparing as it should be.

It doesn’t matter if you find Kamra’s jokes funny or not. 

Kamra’s jokes are important because they remind us of a truth so many have forgotten: Fear should never be allowed to triumph, if our democracy has to survive. With his courage, Kamra breaks the omerta. 

 That is why we need to sit up and worry about what is likely to follow.

(Kunal Purohit is an award-winning independent journalist, writing on politics, gender, development, inequalities, and the intersections between them. He is an alumnus of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)