In the documentary The Mindscape of Alan Moore , based on a long interview with the writer, Moore describes why in medieval times, a writer and a magician were the same thing. “Grimoire”, the book of spells, was just a fancy way of saying “grammar”, and to “cast a spell” was…to spell correctly. And if a warrior was angry with you, Moore said, they could kill or maim but a writer could create a dirty limerick about you, and people would make cruel fun of you hundreds of years after your demise. Comedy is one of the most effective ways to assert one’s freedom of speech, which, as Salman Rushdie reminded us, means zilch without the freedom to offend.

India seems to have forgotten this, sadly.

Earlier this year, stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra wrote a Facebook post about his landlady kicking him out abruptly because of his politics. In the same post, Kamra also mentioned how dissenting comedians were being frozen out slowly but surely — corporations cancelling shows at the last minute, too afraid to anger the kind of Twitter troll mobs who threatened Kamra after his first-ever comedy clip, a lampoon of chest-thumping nationalism. Kamra is now best known for his YouTube podcast Shut Up Ya Kunal , which has featured the likes of Umar Khalid and Shehla Rashid.

To be sure, there are perfectly acceptable critiques to be made of Kamra’s brand of comedy and/or journalism. Exactly zero of these critiques come in Kamra’s way on an average day in the Twitter-verse, where he is subjected to the choicest invective with remarkable monotony. Only last week, the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, decided to cancel one of his shows, due to be hosted on campus. Former students of the university wrote to the vice-chancellor, apparently, complaining about the university providing a platform for a member of the so-called “tukde tukde gang” (people who’d split India asunder), a moniker that would be hilarious if it weren’t so pervasive and horrific. The same slur has been used ad nauseam for three of his guests, at least — Kanhaiya Kumar, Rashid and Khalid, not to mention Jignesh Mevani.

The question is, whither freedom? On paper, the Internet is the most democratic of tools, a course-flattening event that has outsourced political power to our fingertips. The truth of 21st century India, however, is that when folks such as Kamra exercise their freedom of speech, they have to deal with real-world consequences every single time — displacement, loss of income, and of course, periodic death threats.

Whither freedom, then?

If an Aditi Mittal has come to accept a certain amount of misogynist abuse as par for the course (a rather deflating phrase at the best of times), how meaningful is her freedom of expression? If an Aisi Taisi Democracy (the part stand-up, part musical comedy featuring Varun Grover, Rahul Ram and Sanjay Rajoura) is heckled and sometimes stopped mid-song in some perfectly “respectable” parts of our country (such as MNNIT Allahabad, where this happened in 2016), can we honestly say that these creators are free to express themselves? If the right to offend gets you fired or behind bars, why go on with this charade of liberalism? When an entire country has shown, time and time again, that we have no sense of humour, what power can a joke possibly wield?

The good news is that the powers that be are shaken to the core. Journalists are being fired, activists jailed, dissenters muzzled. In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections there is no doubt that the political discourse in this country will only worsen in terms of bigotry, misogyny and lack of empathy. Things are going to get real ugly real soon — and well-aimed jokes expose hypocrisy and double standards like nothing else. In China, search strings with Winnie the Pooh were banned en masse after Xi Jinping was alerted to a series of jokes about him being compared to Pooh (the discerning reader is advised to check them out, only if she is prepared to commit to 10 minutes of uproarious laughter). Apparently there is a similarity in facial features and general honey-soaked chubbiness. Before the ban took effect, though, Chinese users gifted us with an unforgettable image of Pooh sitting on a throne with a honey pot, a reference to Jinping abolishing presidential term limits in a blatant power-grab. The Twitter-verse had a field day and the world was soon saturated with precisely the story Jinping did not want them to see: China’s thin veneer of democracy finally collapsing.

This is what jokes can do: They can galvanise people into action, they can condense key bits of information into a memorable kernel of giggles. This is why I am convinced that the current dispensation is crying out to be memorialised for hundreds of years to come. The only difference is that it is thinking in terms of statues and plaques, like that nice little eyesore opposite the Narmada Dam. This writer, meanwhile, has dusted off his notebook of dirty limericks. It’s time.

Aditya Mani Jha works at Penguin Random House India

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