INDIA ILLUSTRATED

The twists and turns of Indian politics over the years captured by the sketch pens of india today’s cartoonists, including Sudhir Dar, Abu Abraham, Ravi Shankar, Ajit Ninan, Sandeep Adhwaryu and R. Prasad

The first issue of india today arrived on the stands at the worst time for press freedom. It was December 1975 and just four months after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government had declared an Emergency. Press censorship was the order of the day. “To stop the spread of rumours,” as Mrs Gandhi’s Goebbelsian information and broadcasting minister Vidya Charan Shukla told a press conference in the capital on June 25.

Censorship was just one thing. Civil liberties were curbed, Parliament was suspended, the Opposition jailed and, yes, as the wry trope went, the trains ran on time. The Emergency, as Abu Abraham’s iconic cartoon in The Indian Express showed, was President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signing ordinances from his bathtub.

Since then, the sketch pens of india today’s iconic political cartoonists—from Sudhir Dar to Abu Abraham, Ravi Shankar, Ajit Ninan, Sandeep Adhwaryu and R. Prasad—have captured the twists and turns of Indian politics. Be it the return of Mrs Gandhi, the Rajiv Gandhi years or the reign of V.P. Singh. The Atal Behari Vajpayee era, the Manmohan Singh premiership and, finally, the age of Modi. A curation of some of our finest who have illustrated the rush of news through the march of time.