Political cartoonist Aseem Trivedi was released from an Indian jail on Wednesday after he was arrested earlier this week in what was denounced as a politically motivated arrest.
Trivedi was jailed on charges of sedition, but Trivedi maintained that his cartoons were designed to point out corruption in the Indian government, not seek to undermine it. The cartoons were posted on his website
“We will continue our fight against corruption. We want the sections of sedition to be removed from the [Indian Penal Code]. This is the section under which Pandit Nehru, Lokmanya Tilak and Ghandhi ji were booked. It should be scrapped now,” he was quoted as saying by the Times of India after he was freed.
He had earlier said he would not post bail, insisting he did nothing wrong.
The Indian High Court on Tuesday said, “If drawing those cartoons is the only charge, then his custody is not required,” the Hindustan Times reported.
Human rights organizations criticized his arrest, saying the government should repeal the sedition law, which dates back to India’s colonial period.
“Arresting cartoonists for their stinging satire is a hallmark of a dictatorship, not a democracy,” Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. He added, “The law that put him behind bars [should be] promptly repealed.”
