News Desk
MALE’, Maldives — The cartoon seemed harmless enough. A dead cow at an altar, drawn in Abdulla Naeem Ibrahim’s loose, unassuming strokes, printed in the morning pages of Afathis.
But the timing was fatal.
The night before, a young recruit of the National Security Service had collapsed during training. Whispers of his death trickled through Malé’s narrow lanes. And when the newspaper appeared the next day, the cartoon — innocent in intent — was interpreted as mockery.
Naeem was summoned to the NSS headquarters, the institution that preceded today’s Maldives military. Like others before him, he was kept waiting, the silence heavier than the questions that would follow. When the interrogation began, it was prefaced not by words but by a fist across his nose. The punch was punctuation. Only then came the question: Was the cartoon meant to ridicule the dead recruit? The institution?
The episode was an early lesson in how fragile humor becomes under watchful regimes. The cartoonist insisted it was coincidence. But coincidence itself was suspect.
“Dictatorships cannot afford laughter,” wrote K. Shankar Pillai, India’s most celebrated cartoonist, in his final editorial before Shankar’s Weekly closed in 1975.
He had watched authoritarianism spread like damp, suffocating the irreverence on which satire survives. “In all the years of Hitler,” Shankar warned, “there never was a good comedy, not a good cartoon, not a parody, or a spoof.”
It is a warning that echoes uncomfortably across small states like the Maldives, where the space for expression has historically shrunk and expanded with the tides of politics. Cartoons — once found in the biting lines of Aabaaru magazine, the margins of Haveeru, or the free-spirited pages of Afathis — have long served as barometers of that space. When voices were throttled, humor often slipped through. Until it, too, was throttled.
The Maldives’ most towering figure in cartooning remains Ahmed Abbas. In the restless early years of the Maldivian Democratic Party, Abbas’s cartoons were not just doodles but dispatches — visual protests slipped into the bloodstream of political change. His art spoke where words were gagged.
Another enduring figure is Naeembe, remembered for the beloved Maakanaa series in Haveeru. A known illustrator and artist, Naeem’s characters, part parable and part parody, etched themselves into popular imagination.
These were artists working in an environment where every joke was a risk, every sketch a possible summons. Freedom of expression, here, has never been a neutral phrase. It means saying what you see without the shadow of intimidation. It means drawing without first censoring yourself in your own mind.
Jawaharlal Nehru, often lampooned in Shankar’s Weekly, welcomed such scrutiny. “Don’t spare me, Shankar,” he told the cartoonist. He once added, “It is good to have the veil of our conceit torn occasionally.”
His words remind us of the democratic value of satire — a system’s ability to laugh at itself is its test of strength.
Mahatma Gandhi, writing to Shankar in 1939 after a series of cartoons on Mohamed Ali Jinnah, offered something more precise: “Your cartoons are good as works of art. But if they do not speak accurately and cannot joke without offending, you will not rise high in your profession. Above all, you should never be vulgar. Your ridicule should never bite.”
It was not humor Gandhi feared, but cruelty. His advice remains a masterclass in principled satire — a sharp contrast to regimes that fear satire altogether.
On Sunday, August 31, 2025, the world marked fifty years since Shankar’s Weekly shut its doors. Modeled on the British Punch, it quickly acquired an Indian voice of its own. Nehru inaugurated it, though he was often its target. For nearly three decades it remained irreverent, fearless, “fundamentally anti-establishment, while never toeing any particular line,” as Shankar himself described.
His farewell after Indira Gandhi’s emergency, tinged with both resignation and hope, still reads like a prophecy: “Despite the present situation, the world will become a happier and more relaxed place… We prefer to call it human destiny.”
But destiny is uneven. In the Maldives, the distance between a cartoon and a clenched fist is still alarmingly short. The story of Naeem’s dead cow sketch is not a relic of the past, but a reminder of how fragile expression remains in small places ruled by large fears.
The harder truths — corruption, abuse of power, the rot beneath public life — emerge only when an investigative journalist dares to dive into that abyss. Yet truth itself is feared, and when the space for it shrinks, satire often becomes the last refuge. A cartoon can say what a column cannot. But even that space is narrowing. We have entered a time when laughter itself — laughter for the sake of expression — risks being forbidden.
In a democracy, laughter should sting but not wound. It should pierce conceit, not punish coincidence. When humor disappears, it is not just comedy that dies. It is the freedom to breathe without fear.
Because, as Shankar warned, “Dictatorships cannot afford laughter.”
