Indian comedian arrested for allegedly insulting Hindus

For more than a month, Munawar Faruqui, a 30-year-old comic with disheveled hair, languished in prison for a joke he didn’t tell.

Faruqui was beginning to make his name among the crowded ranks of Indian stand-up comedians. More than half a million people have subscribed to his YouTube channel, where his presentations feature a bold mix of social and political comments, jokes and overthrows of religious fundamentalism delivered in fast Hindi.

The problems started on the first day of the year, when Faruqui took the microphone at a cafe in the city of Indore. As soon as he was starting his set, a man wearing a white shirt and open vest came on stage and started harassing the comedian, accusing him of insulting Hinduism.

The crowd applauded Faruqui, who is a Muslim, and burst into applause when the man left. Minutes later, Faruqui and four other comedians and event planners were arrested by the police for allegedly making “indecent” and “vulgar” comments.

With bail three times denied by a state court, Faruqui has become a prominent example of what critics say is an escalation of repression against free speech in India by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

A growing number of artists, activists, lawyers and academics who have spoken out against Modi’s Hindu nationalist government have been arrested, accused of sedition and other serious crimes, or violently attacked on social media.

In recent days, India has filed criminal actions against journalists who covered a farmers’ protest on January 26 against proposals for agricultural laws. He ordered Twitter to block hundreds of critical accounts of the prime minister and threatened company employees with prison terms if they did not obey. Last month, producers of a fictional Amazon Prime Video series called “Tandav” apologized after Modi’s party politicians claimed the program had insulted Hindus.

Faruqui’s friends say he was targeted in part because of his faith. The accusations jeopardized the promising career of a small-town fighter whose only offense, they argue, was to mock the powerful establishment in a country that seems increasingly lacking in a sense of humor.

Muslims, who make up about 14% of the population, are the largest religious minority in predominantly Hindu India. Since Modi came to power in 2014 by a Hindu nationalist wave, members of his Bharatiya Janata Party and allied groups have promoted laws that marginalized Muslims and subjected many to the violence of security guards.

Faruqui’s case shows that in India, the world’s most populous democracy, “the judiciary sometimes looks at the accused, not the prosecution,” said Sanjay Hegde, a prominent lawyer who is not involved in the case.

The man who approached him on stage, Eklavya Gaur, is the son of a local leader associated with the ruling BJP. Gaur is the leader of a group called Hind Rakshak Sangathan, one of the many hardline Hindu organizations that have reached prominence under Modi’s government and claim to defend the faith.

A video filmed by an audience member shows Gaur addressing the crowd, saying, “This is Munawar Faruqui. He makes fun of our gods and goddesses and you pay to watch his programs. You do not have shame? “

“Sir,” Faruqui replied calmly, “I am not targeting anyone. I made jokes about Islam. I also made jokes about the triple talaq ”- a practice, until recently legal in India, whereby a Muslim man could divorce his wife simply by saying (or texting) the word three times.

Gaur said he didn’t care; he accused Faruqui of mocking Ram, a Hindu god, which he considered unacceptable. Gaur seemed to be referring to a joke, seen in an online clip, about a classic Bollywood love song in which a woman calls on Ram to celebrate her husband’s return home.

Faruqui joked in English: “Ram-ji doesn’t give a – about your husband.”

In a complaint filed with the police in Indore, Gaur accused Faruqui of “having the deliberate intention to outrage religious feelings”, a crime punishable by up to four years in prison.

Faruqui’s lawyer, Anshuman Srivastava, said that Faruqui did not make this joke at Indore and that Gaur claimed only that he “heard” him practicing the line.

“The police registered the complaint without conducting a preliminary investigation,” said Srivastava. “It looks like this is happening under political pressure.”

With barbed and timely jokes, Faruqui covered sensitive topics during his brief stint on stage. He started with a joke about his home state. “I was born and raised in Gujarat,” he told the crowd. After a pause, he added: “He survived in Gujarat”.

The crowd laughed, but the joke was bleak: Gujarat, a prosperous state in western India, was led by Modi for more than a decade before he became prime minister. Under his supervision in 2002, religious unrest killed more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims.

For years, Modi has been chased over allegations that he has not acted to prevent bloodshed. Although he was never convicted of transgression, the disturbances remain a stain on the prime minister’s career. Many Muslims in Gujarat continue to associate Modi and the BJP with religious persecution.

“I think I survived,” Faruqui continued, “because I believe [the] the government is not good at meeting its goals ”.

This time, low whistles, then laughter and applause.

A few minutes later, he and the others were arrested.

Faruqui, a native of the city of Junagarh, lost his mother at a young age and moved to Mumbai as a teenager to support his family. His first job was at an appliance store, where he earned about $ 1 a day for a 13-hour shift. At the time, he did not speak Hindi or English.

He later found work at a graphic design company, where he discovered he had a knack for inventing short phrases for posters. Around 2017, when an increase in mobile internet access and the arrival of international streaming platforms like Netflix were driving a boom in Indian stand-up comedy, he decided to try to tell jokes to an audience.

At that time, he met another aspiring comic, Saad Shaikh, at a show where they were the only Muslims performing. Bearded Shaikh said many Indians did not catch Faruqui immediately, whose stubble and loose T-shirts give him the appearance of a distracted college student, as a practicing Muslim.

The difference in appearance may help explain his approaches to comedy: Shaikh said he tends to avoid political humor, while Faruqui took more risks with his material.

“It is very easy for a Muslim comedian to be the target,” said Shaikh.

Aditi Mittal, a Mumbai stand-up comedian, said that political comedy has become increasingly worrying under Modi’s rule. Since 2014, Mittal said, even making jokes about rising gas prices has yielded cries of protest from supporters of the prime minister.

“You never know what can lead to controversy, and that is always on my mind when I write jokes,” she said. “But it is our responsibility to speak up.”

Last summer, comedian Agrima Joshua received threats of rape and death for telling jokes that allegedly insulted Shivaji, the 17th-century warrior king revered by Hindu nationalists in the state of Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai.

Comedian Kunal Kamra is facing charges of contempt in the Indian Supreme Court for tweets criticizing the court after he bailed out pro-BJP news anchor Arnab Goswami in a case involving the 2018 deaths of an interior designer and the mother of the designer.

Kamra refused to apologize and issued a passionate statement in which he wrote: “If powerful people and institutions continued to show an inability to tolerate rebuke or criticism, we would be reduced to a country of incarcerated artists and flourishing pet dogs.”

Sanjay Rajoura, a member of the Aisi Taisi Democracy satirical troupe in New Delhi, said the case against Faruqui is the sign of a “rotten society” and would persecute him even if he were released and cleared of any wrongdoing.

“Who’s going to give him shows?” Rajoura said. “Those who have locations will be afraid of reaction. Sponsors too. This will have an impact on your career. “

Ashutosh Bagri, the police superintendent in Indore, said he had promised a “fair and impartial” investigation. But the Madhya Pradesh state court harshly criticized Faruqui, most recently at a hearing on January 25, when a judge accused him of taking “undue advantage of other people’s religious feelings and emotions” in his act.

“What’s wrong with your mindset?” asked the judge. “How can you do this for the purpose of your business? These people are not to be spared. “

The judge ordered Faruqui to return to his cell in Indore, where he has been held incommunicado since the first week of January.

Shaikh said that in the months before the incident in Indore, Faruqui began to realize that many people in India felt the same way as the judge. Last April, social media trolls threatened him because of his jokes about Hinduism. A hashtag asking for his arrest had a national trend briefly.

“It shook him,” recalled Shaikh. “He was even questioning his comedy at the time, but we told him to have faith in the judiciary. Looking back, we were probably wrong. “

Special correspondent Parth MN reported from Mumbai and the Times staff writer Bengali from Singapore.