For the second time in three weeks, the Indian cartoonist Satish Acharya found himself effectively invisible on Instagram — in his own country.
The 55-year-old discovered on Tuesday that his account had again been briefly blocked in India, with no explanation from the platform. Users there could neither find his profile through search nor reach it by web link. Anyone who tried saw a message saying it was unavailable under India’s Information Technology Rules.
The first block ran from 28 September to 6 October. The second lasted three days this week.
“Meta platforms have been restricting the reach of my cartoons for some years,” Acharya told the BBC’s Nikita Yadav. “But when my entire profile was restricted in India, I was a little sad.”
He wrote to Meta and received no reply. He was preparing to go to court when the account came back by itself in early October — then went dark again.
He is not the only one
Weeks earlier, the cartoonist Manjul found that Instagram had restricted a post criticising India’s election commission over its contested revision of voter rolls. His profile stayed up; the post did not.
Meta told the BBC it may temporarily restrict accounts to comply with India’s IT Rules, but did not explain the specific reasons in either case.
The rules allow authorities and courts to order platforms to remove or restrict content. The government says they help tackle unlawful material. Artists and free-speech advocates say they are being used against political satire.
The number nobody expected
The Indian Express, using a right-to-information request, reported that government agencies sent nearly 195,000 blocking and content-restriction orders to platforms including Instagram, Facebook and YouTube between March and July, through the federal government’s Sahyog portal.
What the figures do not show is how many posts were ultimately restricted or removed, and the BBC notes it has not seen the original response. But the volume alone changes the shape of the problem: at that scale, restriction stops being a series of individual decisions anyone could review and becomes a process.
Technology policy expert Prateek Waghre says platforms differ in how they respond. Meta, he says, “seem more willing to comply”, while X appears more willing to push back — though limited public data makes comparisons difficult. Meta declined to comment on his assessment.
Authorities have reportedly gone further, asking Meta to ensure its systems do not steer users towards “a single or limited set of narratives” and to strengthen checks on content that could “cause public disorder or incite violence”. India’s IT ministry has not responded to the BBC.
Why cartoons, and why now
Satire has become a visible part of political dissent in India, particularly among younger people. Memes and Gen-Z humour helped fuel protests over education and jobs in July that ended with the education minister resigning. Online argument has since intensified over the voter-roll revision that removed 130 million names.
The political weight of the platforms is not lost on anyone. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP has urged ministers to strengthen their online presence and reach younger audiences.
None of this is new in kind. Cartoons have been a fixture of Indian journalism since independence — RK Laxman’s Common Man among its most recognisable creations. During the Emergency of the 1970s, Abu Abraham kept drawing while dozens of his cartoons were stamped “not passed by censors”. In 2012 the cartoonist Aseem Trivedi was arrested on sedition charges over work said to mock the constitution; the charges were later dropped.
India now ranks 157th in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index. The government rejects criticism of its record, saying India’s media remains free and vibrant. The comedian Kunal Kamra, known for jokes about Modi, has faced threats, cancelled shows and legal action.
What the cartoonists say about it
“We are among the default opposition,” says Sandeep Adhwaryu, a cartoonist at a leading Indian newspaper. “The nature of the craft is to oppose” — cartoonists, like journalists, must question whoever holds power.
Acharya makes the same point from his own record. Before 2014, many of his cartoons targeted the Congress-led government, and BJP leaders shared them.
The part that travels
The mechanism here is worth understanding anywhere that political argument has moved onto platforms owned elsewhere, Bangladesh included. A legal order goes to a company. The company complies, or partly complies. The person affected learns about it by discovering their own work has gone, and is told only which rule was cited.
That design has a specific consequence: there is no moment at which the decision is visible to anyone except the two parties who made it. The remedy an affected creator has — write to the platform, get no reply, consider the cost of a court case — is the same whichever country they are in. Which is why the count of orders, published only because someone filed an information request, is the most useful fact in the story.
