New Delhi, India – Stand-up comic Brijesh Jha posted a parody video on Instagram last week to protest the removal of his name, along with his father’s and sister’s, from a voter list in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. The video, which alleged that India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had disenfranchised millions of voters at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), garnered 1.7 million views after it was posted on September 29.

Two days later, Meta, the United States-based company that owns Instagram, took the video down, citing local laws without giving further explanation. Jha expressed feelings of helplessness regarding his voting rights being stripped away, noting that as an artist his only recourse is to create art or protest.

Jha said his parody song was removed because the Modi government is fearful following an investigative report by the Indian Express newspaper last month. The report revealed that two of the election commission’s three members had raised serious concerns over a controversial revision of voter rolls being conducted by the poll panel across the country. The exercise, known as the Special Intensive Revision, was launched to identify deceased, duplicate, or dubious voters, but has resulted in the deletion of more than 130 million voters, an overwhelming number of them Muslims.

Opposition politicians and critics accused Kumar of acting at the behest of the BJP and demanded an independent inquiry. These revelations have triggered street protests across India demanding Kumar’s resignation, leading police in New Delhi to briefly detain main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi and other Congress party members during a march to the election commission office.

The BJP accused the opposition of making a concerted effort to change the government and deliberately attacking India’s democracy and constitutional institutions. Protests continued with demonstrations by the satirical Cockroach Janta Party and left-wing student groups in Mumbai and New Delhi.

As inventive expressions of dissent involving humour, art, and music grow online and on the streets, a simultaneous crackdown on memes and jokes has intensified. The Indian government reportedly issued nearly 195,000 content-blocking orders to Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube between March and July following tightened rules in February requiring social media platforms to remove unlawful content within three hours.

Political cartoonist Satish Acharya was also affected, with several of his cartoons removed and his Instagram account blocked in India for over a week. Acharya emphasized that cartoons and digital media have historically served as vital tools for the public to question those in power.

Despite the risks, artists like Jha continue to use their platforms to voice dissent, urging the administration to restore voting rights and halt the widening crackdown on digital expression.