Umpteen indices and rankings rate the quality of democracy and civil freedoms. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Transparency International, World Audit and so on all compare nations across multiple indicators. Then there’s the Global Peace Index, which ranks countries by levels of internal peace and external aggression; and the Cato Institute, which tracks economic freedoms.
Making sense of these and reconciling their findings involve long sessions wading through methodologies while liberally applying cold towels to craniums. Singapore ranks high on economic freedom but doesn’t do so well on civil liberties. The US jails and executes a large number of its citizens (and fights overseas wars) while also scoring high on free speech and gender equality.
There is space for a single indicator that offers a quick way to judge the quality of civil freedom. This would have to be something like the Economist’s Big Mac Index, which offers an easy way to grasp purchasing power parity by comparing hamburger prices across currencies.
One way to do this may be to focus on the sensitivity of political regimes to criticism, and more specifically to the way regimes respond to the slings and arrows of outrageous satire. Even more, when it’s directed at their personal appearances and habits.
Nobody likes being laughed at. But in liberal nations, politicians will grin and bear it when somebody draws a cartoon, or does a skit, or writes a funny poem about them. For example, former British prime minister Edward Heath, who famously liked sailing, often featured in Punch falling out of boats. Churchill was always portrayed within a fog of cigar smoke. Thatcher’s handbag and big hair were always emphasised in Private Eye in the cartoons accompanying the long-running “Dear Bill” letters column, which was purportedly written by her husband, Denis.
Hair or the lack of it seems to be something that monarchs and politicians are especially sensitive about. Perhaps one could develop a hair index of civil freedom: how do politicians respond to disparaging commentary or artwork about their hair?
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Kaiser Wilhelm II made a habit of jailing people who criticised his immaculately waxed moustache, while allowing trenchant criticism of his foreign policy and tax regime to pass unchallenged. Hitler took it a step further by having critics of his moustache strangled with piano wires. Stalin did almost as well when he exiled poet Osip Mandelstam to Siberia, for comparing the Stalinist moustache to a “huge laughing cockroach”.
By those standards, Indian politicians have done well. Gandhiji hardly cared about caricatures. Nehru used to ask for signed versions of Laxman and Shankar cartoons, where he was usually shown with a bald head and sometimes with tufts of hair poking out of his ears. His daughter was, by all accounts, proud of her signature white streak, though she wasn’t known for her tolerance of satire.
The spate of scams in recent times has given rise to a spate of poems and cartoons that inevitably focus on the political class. Nobody has yet, to my knowledge, written a poem about the prime minister’s beard or the Congress president’s (non-existent) moustache, but it’s probably only a matter of time. The IT minister’s midriff has featured in cartoons and so have the prime minister’s turban and the finance minister’s veshti.
At worst, there have been futile attempts to block the dissemination of these on the Web, which is a far cry from piano wires and exile to Siberia. The hullabaloo over the “Sonar Kella” parody featuring the West Bengal chief minister was worrying, however. So is the charging of cartoonist Aseem Trivedi with sedition and denigration of national symbols for his anti-corruption cartoons. A nation that cannot openly lampoon its politicians is a nation that falls short in terms of civil liberties.