WHY POWER FEARS LAUGHTER

Last week a satirical cartoon about India’s university equity rules flickered online before vanishing under a government takedown order.

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A small act, perhaps. Yet every silenced joke is a stress test of democracy, and a warning sign when leaders fail it. Satire is oxygen in a democracy. It clears the air, punctures illusions, and reminds citizens that authority is temporary and answerable. A cartoon exaggerates precisely so the public cannot ignore what polite language conceals: hypocrisy, arrogance, policy failure. When governments choke off that oxygen, they reveal not strength but fragility. History's strongest leaders understood this instinctively. Winston Churchill, lampooned as a bulldog with jowls, collected caricatures and called them the “regular food” of democracy. Franklin Roosevelt endured portrayals as schemer and would-be dictator yet never tried to suppress them. Jawaharlal Nehru told one of India’s great cartoonists, “Don’t spare me.” Each governed through extraordinary strain, world war, economic depression, the birth of new nations, and each accepted ridicule as part of the democratic bargain. They knew that satire was not an enemy of author