Meet the cartoonist threatened with jail for offending India’s establishment

When India’s highest court granted bail to a firebrand right-wing news anchor after fast-tracking his hearing, cartoonist Rachita Taneja responded with a satirical drawing to highlight his apparent state backing and hold up a mirror to power, something she does every day through her stick-figure comic series.

Taneja is used to the vitriol she receives daily from internet trolls. This time, however, the pushback came from the Supreme Court itself.

The 29-year-old satirist was charged with contempt of court, and could face up to six months in prison, after her cartoon highlighted the fact that as Republic TV’s Arnab Goswami walked out of jail, many other journalists without such good connections to the establishment were left languishing in detention, often for months, without trial.

In an interview with The Independent, Taneja – a media graduate – says she identifies herself as a campaigner first and foremost, and never set out to mince her words.

Her cartoons are published under the title Sanitary Panels on Instagram and Twitter, where she has a combined total of around 125,000 followers. Through seemingly simple stick figure drawings, she addresses issues spanning gender, politics and society.

“I have no idea how I got to the name,” says Taneja, but she believes she knew it was going to be “confrontational from the get go”.

In one recent comic, Taneja points out the underlying misogyny in states’ so-called “Love Jihad” laws, designed by men to protect Hindu women from a perceived campaign of forced conversion by Muslims. There’s no evidence such a conspiracy exists.

In another comic strip, she addresses the protests led by farmers in northern India against reforms to open up the sector to private market forces – and the government’s alleged apathy towards them.

“I think feminism is political, I think talking about mental health issues or LGTBQ issues, these are all political things. I would say that as a feminist and as a person who holds these values, I wanted to make sure that my work reflected those ideas of justice,” Taneja says.

Now based in Bengaluru, Taneja was brought up in a Hindu family in Delhi and studied media at Delhi University. After initially working for GreenPeace, Taneja says she realised she wanted to pursue a career in human rights and environmental issues.

She began Sanitary Panels in 2014, after she drew a cartoon about the arrest of students under the now defunct Section 66a, which gave the state the power to arrest anyone for “offensive” posts on social media. She then campaigned for several issues including net neutrality and was invited to join the board of influential Internet Freedom Foundation.

“When I started, the only reason I made stick figures was because I didn’t know how to draw,” she says. Now though, her drawings can reach millions of people. During last year’s nationwide protests against the government's controversial plans to amend citizenship laws, some of her comic strips were turned into posters and wall murals.

Taneja thinks her drawings reach out to a large number of people because she doesn’t use complex colours or techniques and is instead focused on the message.

“I spend more time on conceptualising a comic than actually drawing it,” she says.

She says her association with activism started before the Modi government came to power. “At that time I was campaigning on [against] the Congress government because the Congress was in power.”

Nevertheless, for years now Taneja has been the target of vicious trolling from ring-wing supporters of the Modi government, a barrage that often involves death threats and the outing of personal information. She is not the only female activist or journalist to frame this as a coordinated attack by the IT cell of the ruling BJP party.

“Sometimes I will see just like a wave of mass reporting or a wave of trolling and this happened a lot around the general election of 2019. Like, you can tell that they are completely activated at the time,” Taneja says.

“There is a lot of misogyny and homophobia and basically people just waiting to take you down, if you are someone who has an opinion that does not fall [in line] with their understanding of what politics should be.”

That doesn’t mean she takes the threats lightly. “There’s always a thought: ‘What happens to my safety if I post something like this?’

“Because when you receive regular threats, some of them do get very specific and do get very graphic, and it makes you think: ‘Am I going to be safe?’”

However, Taneja says she recognises her privilege, and the fact she has a voice – meaning that speaking up is all the more important. “I feel like it is my duty to speak on these issues. If I have all these privileges, I should make use of them.”

India has a rich history of comedians and cartoonists freely criticising the establishment, a fact that has made the Supreme Court’s action against Taneja all the more alarming for those in her line of work, coming alongside similar proceedings against the stand-up comedian Kumal Kamra.

A group of 600 artists have released a joint statement calling on the apex court to drop the proceedings, describing the apparent crackdown on critical comedy and satire as authoritarian.

In its initial order allowing the charges against Taneja to go ahead – a trial date has not yet been set – the court called her drawings “an audacious assault and insult to the (this) institution”.

The drawings in question showed in one cartoon the Supreme Court adorned with a saffron flag, the colours of the ruling BJP and a dig at their alleged closeness in recent years. Another shows Goswami as a naughty child between the BJP and the Supreme Court as his parents, and the caption reads: “Don’t you know who my father is?”

Taneja would not comment specifically on the ongoing Supreme Court case, but she stressed that while it may seem like a dark moment for those in her position, she sees plenty to be positive about.

“Honestly, there are so many amazing creators that are just starting off their journey now, and every day I come across someone new who is making amazing art,” she says.

And she says that while the trolling gets a lot of attention, she is always heartened by the public response to her work. “I am constantly amazed by the responses to the comic. For each troll that I receive, I receive a hundred more positive interactions.”