An Indore-based cartoonist who was booked for depicting Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in an allegedly undignified manner was granted interim protection from arrest by the Supreme Court on Tuesday, Live Law reported.

However, the bench of Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Aravind Kumar cautioned that if the cartoonist, Hemant Malviya, continued to share offensive posts on social media, the Madhya Pradesh government was free to take action against him, PTI reported.

The order came after Malviya submitted an apology for his social media post. The court has directed the cartoonist to file the apology in Hindi as an affidavit, Live Law reported.

On Monday, the cartoonist agreed to delete the allegedly objectionable post after being criticised by the Supreme Court.

Malviya had moved the top court challenging a Madhya Pradesh High Court order that denied him anticipatory bail in the case.

The High Court in its July 3 order observed that Malviya had “clearly overstepped” the limits of free speech and misused his right to expression.

The court held that the cartoonist had failed to exercise discretion while publishing the caricature and held that his custodial interrogation was necessary.

The case

Malviya had published the original cartoon on January 6, 2021, which depicted Modi as a doctor administering an injection to a man dressed in what may have appeared to some as the uniform of the RSS.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

It was accompanied with the Hindi caption: “Why are you worried? Serum’s Poonawala has said that the vaccine only has water, you won’t die from the side effect of water!”

This was a reference to Serum Institute of India’s chief executive Adar Poonawalla alleging that many Covid-19 vaccines in the market were only as effective as water.

According to the Madhya Pradesh High Court order, a Facebook user had republished the cartoon, but replaced the caption with one in which the man in the purported RSS uniform addresses Modi as an incarnation of the Hindu deity Shiva and asks to be injected with such a strong dose of the caste census in his buttocks so that he forgets the Pahalgam terror attack, the controversial Waqf Act, among other matters.

Malviya had shared the amended version of his cartoon on Facebook on May 1, writing that anyone could use any of his cartoons by writing their own names and captions. All his cartoons were for the public, by the public and dedicated to the public, he said.

He added that the amended cartoon was shared with him by a friend and that whoever had created the caption had written well.

Based on this, a RSS member had filed a complaint, alleging that Malviya had posted objectionable content on Facebook that defamed the Hindutva organisation and hurt religious sentiments.

Malviya was booked in May under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Information Technology Act pertaining to promoting enmity between different groups, acts intended to outrage religious feelings, intentional insult and electronically publishing or transmitting material containing sexually explicit acts.

Malviya has argued that he was falsely implicated in the case and that his work was merely satire. He also said that the comments about the caricature on Facebook were not his own, and therefore, he could not be held responsible for them.

Also read: Why MP High Court ordered a cartoonist to be arrested for lampooning Modi and RSS