Government Paranoia Leads to Jailing for Cartoon in India
This article is for subscribers only.
States are granted the power to arrest or detain citizens. It follows that governments, which represent the state but are congregations of human actors, should exercise extreme self-restraint in depriving human beings of their liberty, and in particular never use the state's power to settle personal scores.
All these foundational axioms of democratic civility and integrity were thrown to the wind last week by the chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, and her party, the Trinamool Congress, when they swooped down upon and incarcerated a college professor for the earthshaking crime of circulating an e-mail that contained a cartoon mocking Banerjee and two members of her party.