The gelastic release of tension through social media buffoonery shouldn’t lull the government into a false sense of security. Humour speaks truth to power. It ridicules and undermines the powerful. It is a potent form of vox populi, beyond the scope of repression. The hilarity doesn’t make it any less serious a commentary on the performance of the ruling dispensation.
Critics of demonetisation must acknowledge its one positive side-effect: unleashing a firestorm of creative humour across the digital world. Indians have sallied forth with jokes, cartoons and animations all ‘taking the piss’ at the expense of the ruling dispensation. Quip-enabled if cash-disabled, India is cackling its way through the currency crunch to its highest-ever Gross Drollery Product.
Humour is the most creative form of non-violent protest and the most dangerous, because it is unanswerable. It reinforces negative public sentiment against the state in the most gentle of ways, lightening the mood and dissipating anger while subtly undermining its authority. Bards and poets are justly feared by rulers, for their ability to turn a Prime Minister’s tears into a titter-worthy travesty.
Demonetisation (“demonisation” in facebook parlance) may well prove PM Modi’s Achilles-hee-hee. His trademark opening, “Mitron”, is now defined on social media as “Noun (p. mit-rohn) a large group of unsuspecting people, about to be hit by something they will take a long time to recover from”. One animation has PM Modi dancing to a Bollywood number as Mamata and Mayawati simmer, another has him addressing a herd of sheep (BJP workers), who bleat in approval at everything he says. His predecessor, Manmohan Singh, is seen chortling, with the tagline: “Those who voted for change are now running around for it”.
Bollywood has been unsparing. The latest ‘Ajit’ joke: “Prem – Where’s Mona darling? Ajit – Maine usko de-Mona-tise kar diya”. Forthcoming film releases, starring PM Modi: Cheque de India, Currency na milegi dobara, Ae Bill hai mushkil, Fifty Shades of Black, etc. You get the drift. Finance minister Arun Jaitley has also come in for a small share of goofy GIFs, for all that he’s hard to caricature.
Bonding in serpentine lines outside banks and ATMs, perfect strangers developed a cashless medium of exchange: one-liners. “Akhir Queue?” chortled a mango man. “Hum line mein lag chuke sanam” replied another. A pun-dit took the art to a new low: “So one Arab tells another: “Aap Qatar mein hain, aap Kuwait karna padega”. Taking his queue from the mango man, Rahul Gandhi lined up at a bank for a slice of (political) capital, but couldn’t cash in on public discontent. He left, flush with anger rather than funds.
Perhaps that’s where the Opposition failed, by forgetting to bring its funnybone to Parliament. Not all its rants, or the diatribes by economist and black money expert Arun Kumar or the epic letter to the PM by former-bureaucrat and public policy expert EAS Sharma, denouncing the half-baked ‘war on black money’, have had an impact comparable to the comic genius of an auto-rickshaw wallah: “Don’t honk…kyunki sarkar ne hamari pahle se baja rakhi hai”.
To be fair, the government unstintingly gave the comic corps rich fodder. Legal tender became legal tinder but instead of going up in smoke, found its way into Jan Dhan accounts. Jhuggi-wallahs became dhani overnight, prompting the PM to advise them to hang on to the money in their accounts, instead of returning it to the original owners. Almost as much money as had been withdrawn came back into the system, raising the question of where o where had all the black money gone? Rich hauls of currency, both old and new, were recovered in raids – some from BJP personnel – and this added to the social media merriment over missing moolah.
The government’s credibility plummeted with each new joke. Not only did BJP ministers celebrate elaborate weddings, but failed to put the lid on cash donations to political parties (a big source of black money). With the RBI mandating unlimited deposits but limited withdrawals, India concluded the only thing it could bank on was the bottomless fund of internet humour. The gelastic release of tension through social media buffoonery shouldn’t lull the government into a false sense of security. Humour speaks truth to power. It ridicules and undermines the powerful. It is a potent form of vox populi, beyond the scope of repression. The hilarity doesn’t make it any less serious a commentary on the performance of the ruling dispensation.
Researchers describe four forms of political humour: supportive, benign, undermining and subversive. No prizes for guessing which form the demonetisation burlesque is all about. India is chaffing, even as it chuckles.
The author is a senior journalist with 35 years of experience in working with major newspapers and magazines.
She is now an independent writer and author
