Blog

Now, here is where careful thinking matters. The political aftermath, the bounties, the threats, the howling mob politics was reprehensible. When Kunal Kamra made jokes about Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, Shiv Sena supporters vandalised the hotel where the show was held. That too was wrong. The answer to bad speech is not violence. The answer to a tasteless joke is not a rape threat, as happened to another comic. These responses belong in a different category of shame altogether. But and this is the but that too many liberal commentators skip over, the wrongness of the mob’s reaction does not make the original content right. These are two separate moral questions and collapsing them together is a disservice to common sense and society. You can believe that Allahbadia should never face a violent threat and also believe that his ‘joke’ was crass, unfunny and an insult to the intelligence of the medium. Both can be true, both are true.