Toon master Cho advocates discipline

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While faulting the police for overreacting to the Aseem Trivedi’s cartoon by slapping sedition charges, political commentator Cho S. Ramaswamy said media persons should also exercise self-discipline and not assume that freedom of expression must be absolute. He should know as his Tughlak remains, perhaps, the only magazine to use a political cartoon as the cover every week.

He might not have faced the same sort of harsh treatment as Trivedi got at the hands of the police but Cho too had gone through some harrowing times because of the rulers’ intolerance towards the harsh criticism reflected in his cartoons. “I give the ideas to the cartoonists and get them to draw. My cartoonists have got used to my thinking, so they deliver good and fast”, he said.

“One unforgettable episode relates to the Thuglak cartoon on the Kuo oil scam in 1976, when Indira Gandhi was the Prime Minister. Arun Shourie had written extensively on the scandal, even giving out the file numbers. I made a cartoon showing Mrs Gandhi picking up a can of tar with ‘Kuo Oil’ written on it and throwing the contents on the national flag, blackening it.

:The idea was to show that the Prime Minister had shamed the nation, bringing it disrepute. But a Tamil Nadu Congressman filed defamation cases against me and I was forced to go to the magistrate’s court many times. Finally, I filed a petition in the court listing out the files mentioned by Shourie and demanding that the court summon Mrs Gandhi as witness to be cross-examined by me with regard to those files. The defamation suit was dismissed in the next hearing”.

Another ‘famous’ Thuglak cartoon had two donkeys outside the Tamil Nadu Assembly. There was lot of noise coming from inside the building, so the donkeys decided to move away fast ‘lest someone may think we are making all this noise’. Cho was summoned by the Assembly privileges committee led by the late V.R. Nedunchezhian.

“Kalimuthu, who was a member of the committee, later said that they had wanted to question me but ended up answering my questions. The issue died down when the Assembly got dissolved”.
“Several cartoons get printed everyday lampooning the government, the Prime Minister and top leaders. They do not attract cases because people understand that a cartoon is just a humourous comment on a political event or situation, and must not cause offence. Cartoon is different from a joke as it also conveys some message while joke is pure and simple humour”, Cho explained.