When cartoonist Aseem Trivedi's friends told him that his website could not be accessed anymore, he initially brushed it off as a connection issue. The 24-year-old Kanpur-based professional cartoonist was busy exhibiting his political cartoons in the anti-corruption protest at the MMRDA grounds in Mumbai.
It was only on Dec 27th, the next day, when he received an email from BigRock, the domain name registrar with which his website was registered, that he realized what was wrong. "We have received a complaint from Crime Branch, Mumbai against domain name 'cartoonsagainstcorruption.com' for displaying objectionable pictures and texts related to flag and emblem of India. Hence we have suspended the domain name and its associated services," the mail read.
If the move intended to block access to his cartoons, it has proved futile. Trivedi has moved his content to Blogger, a free blog hosting website from internet giant Google, whose data centres is mostly located in the US.
Trivedi's cartoons comment on bureaucratic processes in general and political personalities in particular, with a special focus on a senior Congress politician. One of the cartoons depicts parliament as a commode; another labels a bloodthirsty "Netasaur" hunting a man as the national animal. Yet another cartoon shows two men wondering whether a mountain peak, helpfully labelled "corruption", would be taller than the Everest.
Now the cartoonist is planning to file an RTI. "I'm an artist. We're supposed to have liberty. This move is tyrannical," says Trivedi, who has been working as a freelance cartoonist for several Hindi newspapers in the Lucknow and Kanpur area.
He is aware that a Mumbai-based lawyer had filed a complaint, acting on which, Big Rock suspended his website. The suspension of his website has already received international attention, with the Wall Street Journal carrying a blog on it earlier this week.
"We received a complaint from the Mumbai Crime Branch and acted on it after evaluating the website according to our own 'acceptable use policy'. We found the material on it to be lewd," Shashank Mehrotra, general manager, BigRock.com told TOI on phone.