On July 15, 2017, Tanmay Bhat, the co-founder of the comedy collective All India Bakchod (AIB) was charged with defamation (IPC 500). This was in response to a tweet posted by AIB that featured an image of a Prime Minister Narendra Modi lookalike spotted at a train station with the Snapchat dog filter superimposed on the PM’s face. The meme was a play on the "#Wanderlust" trend, poking fun at Modi’s frequent foreign trips. What was meant to be a satirical, and ultimately benign joke resulted in mass outrage. Within hours of the tweet, BJP supporters flooded social media, calling the post disrespectful and anti-national. The now-deleted tweet had thousands of comments threatening the comedians with legal action, violence, and shutdown. Soon after, the Mumbai Police’s cybercrime unit launched an investigation under Section 67 of the IT Act, a law meant to curb obscene digital content. A satirical meme had turned into a criminal offense.
Meme As Modern-Day Political Cartoon: Satire, Censorship In The Digital Age
As political memes emerge as the modern successor to editorial cartoons, their power to critique, mobilize, and provoke is met with increasing censorship. But in an era of virality and misinformation, do they deepen political discourse or merely amplify fleeting outrage?
The crackdown on AIB was not an isolated incident but part of a long history of censorship targeting political satire. Before the meme came political cartoons, seen as weapons of dissent. R.K. Laxman’s "Common Man" exposed the absurdities of Indian politics with understated wit, while Abu Abraham’s fearless caricatures in The Indian Express took direct aim at the excesses of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. In the West, David Low’s anti-fascist cartoons were deemed so dangerous that both Hitler and Mussolini attempted to ban them. Cartoons held real power—so much so that governments sought to control or silence them. Today, memes have inherited that power, and, like their print predecessors, they face growing censorship.
The difference? Unlike editorial cartoons, which were the domain of a few, memes are decentralized, created by anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection, and protected by a veil of digital anonymity. This makes them both harder to suppress and more threatening to those in power. The same political establishment that once policed cartoons now turns its attention to memes.
In 2019 BJP youth leader, Priyanka Sharma was arrested in West Bengal for sharing a meme that superimposed Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee's face onto the body of actress Priyanka Chopra. Since then arrests and FIRs have been filed by the Kolkata police, attempting to track, detain, and silence creators who reference Banerjee in their posts.
What distinguishes Priyanka Sharma’s case from AIB’s is her direct political positioning. Her connection to the BJP reveals how memes not only functioned as a tool for public entertainment but also as an essential part of campaigning.
Today politicians and parties are co-opting cultural trends to manufacture their own virality. This was most evident in the 2024 US elections when the Harris campaign took the viral “Brat Summer” trend and incorporated elements of the color scheme, language, and imagery in their design and social media. However, beyond short-lived virality and fuel for countless internet think pieces, the meme failed to resonate. What the Harris campaign and many other memes generated by political figures lack is authenticity.
For a meme to last and make a cultural impact, it must stem from the public, with humor derived from shared cultural understanding rather than top-down messaging.
This idea of authentic virality is what makes the meme such a powerful tool. It represents chaos that is difficult to control, predict and contain. Memes generated by the public provide real-time insight into the social and political climate. Memes like "Maun-Mohan Singh” and “Pappu” appear almost every election cycle, designed to frame Congress candidates as weak, foolish, and incompetent, tapping into public frustration with their governance. Similar to how R.K. Laxman’s ‘Common Man’ cartoons reflected societal frustrations, memes like these condense public sentiment into images with quick recall that resonate widely. Yet, these memes fail to dive deeper into political critique, only scratching the surface of systemic issues through name-calling.
Unlike political cartoons, which could sustain critique over decades, memes face a paradox—while their virality grants them immediate impact, their rapid turnover often prevents them from deepening political engagement. In our digital space, where content is just as quickly generated as it is forgotten, the sheer volume of meme content, combined with increasing access to AI-generated images, makes them vulnerable to being co-opted for misinformation campaigns, diluting their role as tools of critique.
Ultimately, the Meme is polymorphic. It can be used as a propaganda tool by political leaders, as a medium of powerful cultural critique, but most often it is used as a way to get people to laugh during confusing, scary, and uncertain political times. Yet, when a simple Snapchat dog filter can provoke legal action, it becomes clear that memes are more than just jokes—they reveal the anxieties of those in power. Like political cartoons before them, memes expose hypocrisy, challenge authority, and give the public a language to resist. But in an era where both satire and misinformation operate within the same algorithmic churn, the fight for free expression becomes even more urgent. As political landscapes shift and censorship mechanisms tighten, the meme, like the political cartoon before it, will remain a contested space—both a tool of resistance and a site of control.