Censorship

On the night of July 16, 2023, at around 11:30 pm, a journalist and one of Mizoram’s first political cartoonists, Zodinsanga, uploaded his latest toon on Facebook. What made this toon different from the hundreds of others he has drawn over the years was that this time, it included a sketch of the artist himself.

But there was more: what caught people’s attention was how he was sketched: he was kicked out from an office which had the title, Editors Office written on the door. In the toon, Zodinsanga, was up in the air carrying his sketchbook, a cloud of thought had three hashtags, #freedom, #freepress and #thackery while two sketches hung from his hand, one of the ZPM MLA and the party’s Chief Ministerial Candidate Lalduhoma and one of the ZPM Working Chairman, K Sapdanga, also the owner of Mizoram’s biggest daily newspaper, Vanglaini, for which Zodinsanga had been sketching toons for the past few years.

According to trusted sources, the journalist, as per the hashtag in his toon, #thackery came across a similar proposition to the famous cartoonist and Shiv Sena founder, Bal Thackeray who in his days of working as a cartoonist for the Free Press Journal, resigned when his editor restricted attacks on certain politicians.