A respected university professor arrested in 2012 for sharing a satirical cartoon – starting an extraordinary ordeal involving scores of court appearances that have turned his life upside down – has shared his relief at finally been cleared of all charges.
Ambikesh Mahapatra, a professor of chemistry at the prestigious Jadavpur University in the state capital Kolkata was arrested in April 2012 after he forwarded an email to his friends that included a cartoon containing political comment about India’s only female chief minister, the head of West Bengal state, Mamata Banerjee.
After an 11-year fight that has taken a severe toll on his life and finances, Mahapatra tells The Independent that he has suffered “long-drawn harassment” at the hands of the state government over the “innocuous” cartoon.
“The government is using different instruments to curb the constitutional rights of citizens and crush dissent, not just in West Bengal but across the country,” Mahapatra says.
Banerjee, who heads the powerful regional Trinamool Congress (TMC) Party, is in her third consecutive term at the state’s helm and represents one of India’s most powerful forces of opposition to the central BJP government of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.
She has positioned herself as a challenger to Modi’s formidable political machine and often speaks out against the perceived abuses of the federal government when it comes to civil liberties and national issues. In the past week Banerjee’s party has led the chorus of opposition against the Modi government’s attempts to censor a BBC documentary on the 2002 Gujarat riots.
The cartoon shared by Mahapatra deals with the sacking of the then-federal railways minister Dinesh Trivedi, from Banerjee’s TMC party, and his replacement with another politican Mukul Roy. It plays on dialogue from Oscar winning filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s 1974 film “Sonar Kella”, showing Banerjee standing with Roy and commanding the “wicked” Trivedi to “vanish”.
Banerjee appears to have taken offence to the cartoon; speaking several days after Mahapatra’s initial arrest she said it was not satire but “character assassination.”
“It was an innocuous cartoon, nothing unconstitutional – yet the state kept the case pending in court using its police personnel and by managing the judiciary,” Mahapatra says.
Describing the day he was arrested in 2012, he says he was at the office of the housing cooperative where he worked when he was accosted by a large crowd who he believes appeared to be affiliated to the TMC.
“About 70 to 80 miscreants sent by the TMC assaulted me physically in the housing society office and asked the police to arrest me and Subrata Sengupta, who was the housing cooperative secretary at the time. Under the directions of the TMC activists, [officers] took us to the police station.”
He says the TMC members forced him to write a confession statement stating that he was working for the state’s opposition Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M). “I was afraid for my life, and I wrote the confession statement on [their] directives,” he says. This “confession”, he says, later became the basis for the charges filed against him.
Mahapatra says the people who came to his office did not appear to have a copy of his email and he still does not know how they came to know about it.
Court documents state that Mahapatra was accused of sending “obscene emails, printouts and messages involving the Hon’ble Chief Minister of the State” and that he had “verbally defamed the Hon’ble Chief Minister and ‘central minister’ (Trivedi) and had used obscene language against them”.
He was first charged under Section 66A of the Information and Technology Act, a vaguely worded law making it a crime to “send offensive information using a computer or any other electronic device” that was passed in 2000 in the early days of internet use spreading in India. It carried a sentence of up to three years in prison as well as a fine, and has been used by Indian authorities at various levels to go after critics on social media.
Police also levelled charges of defamation and insulting the modesty of a woman under the Indian Penal Code, although when the final chargesheet was presented in court in June 2013, only the charges under Section 66A were present.
India’s Supreme Court finally scrapped Section 66A in 2015, yet it still took another six years for the chief judicial magistrate’s court in Alipore to discharge Mahapatra from the case on that basis. in September 2021, a delay that Mahapatra described at the time as “very mysterious”, “unjust and illegal”.
Even then, however, his ordeal was not over – the court said it was still to decide on a plea of whether to add charges for defamation and insulting the modesty of a woman [Banerjee]. Mahapatra claims the case was kept alive “under the diktats of the state government”.
Finally, last week, a higher court set aside the 2021 order and fully cleared Mahapatra of all charges.
Ambikesh Mahapatra speaking during a panel discussion on the manifestos of political parties in 2021
