Who is a cartoon?

Photo: Sayantoni PalchoudhuriIt was a show of strength from the media and academia. At Delhi’s press club journalists Rajdeep Sardesai, Paranjoy Guha Thakurtha, political scientist Yogendra Yadav, publisher Chiki Sarkar and activist Madhu Kishwar took potshots at the government for expunging a cartoon from political science textbooks.

The cartoon was made in 1949 and has Babasaheb Ambedkar and Jawaharlal Nehru whipping a snail—the Constitution—in order to get it going. According to Yadav, one of the writers of the textbook, the cartoon only depicts the slow pace of the Constitution making process. But politicians have called it defamatory.

The gathering was, however, not pure rant. Cartoonists protested by doing what they are best at. A cartoon had Union Human Resource Development minister Kapil Sibal as nanny trying to chaperone reading habits of adolescents.