K. Shankar Pillai cartoon depicting Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the head of a panel drafting the Constitution, on a snail has caused a ruckus of major proportions in India. The Parliament, which deemed the cartoon an insult to the constitution and the Parliament and has ordered it removed from all books – including textbooks that have already been distributed to schools.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The fall out, apart from holding Parliament hostage from real work, has been that the chief advisors of all political science textbooks at NCERT have quit. Members of Mr. Athawale’s party ransacked the office of one of the advisors. That, he said, was an expression of “indignation on the part of the Dalit community.” Ambedkar was a Dalit, a group that historically falls at the bottom of India’s caste system, and is a popular icon in that community.

Megha Bahree, who wrote the above cited article notes that in the last week that the Indian Parliament has been focusing on the cartoon, several legislative matters have been put on hold including bills to: protect children from sexual offenses, women from sexual harassment at work, whistle blowers protection and a bill to prevent bribery of foreign public officials.

Four Iranian cartoonists were recipients of this year’s Cartooning for Peace award. The winners were Mana Neyestani, Kianoush, Firoozeh Mozaffari and Hassan Karimzadeh. The award is to honor cartoonists “whose talent, contribution and commitment to the values of tolerance, freedom and peace.” An international jury included three cartoonist: New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly, Swiss cartoonist Patrick Chappatte (this year’s winner of the Thomas Nast Award) and French cartoonist Jean Plantu.

An exhibit of their work will be on display for the public until June 3rd in Lake Geneva Switzerland.

Iranian cartoonist Mahmoud Shokraiyeh has been sentenced to 25 lashings after drawing an Iranian parliament member in a football jersey. The cartoon appeared in the magazine Nameye Amir.

While I’m not 100% certain, the image left might be the offending image.

Suprani said that the messages issued by late night show The Razorblade, aired in state-run TV, are part of a “well organized state policy aimed at intimidating the democratic voices that criticize the government’s management and promoting the moral destruction (and maybe even physical) of those who are described as enemies, as Stalinist and fascist regimes used to do.”

That was until a few months before the uprising against Assad began last year, at which point Farzat felt the president had gone too far in stifling freedom of expression and crushing dissent. That’s when it got personal.

“I made that shift from using symbols to portraying actual figures, and little by little I began to see my cartoons being carried by protesters,” Farzat said, surrounded by his works on display at the Mica Gallery in central London.

“They became a symbol for them.”

UPDATE: The Reuter’s link went bad. Now linked to same story on The Chicago Tribune website.

Filmmakers, academics, musicians, women and men of letters are arrested and threatened with death, beaten with electric cables, then abandoned in prison cells… Individuals embodying peace and the civic spirit have been savagely assassinated. The pro-democracy activist, Ghiyath Matar, offered water and roses to the military forces and was killed. The demonstrators’ bard, Ibrahim Qachouch, wrote the song, Syria wants freedom, and they cut his throat. The human rights activist, Farzat Yahya Jarban, filmed the demonstrations, and they gouged out his eyes. Hamza, a boy of 13 years old, was killed and his body mutilated. Hajar, a young girl, was riddled with bullets. Thousands of other people are reported missing.

Today, we are forced to choose between our humanity and a regime that has the blood of Syrians on its hands. Today, we declare ourselves to be on the side of freedom and creativity. We choose a people that has freed itself for the good of all. The freedom expressed on the streets has awoken ours. We cannot bring back to life our martyrs, but we can celebrate their lives and work body and soul with the Syrian revolution, to build a new country where children will not be murdered in the name of nationalist impostures.

Via Tom Spurgeon

According to the Botswana Gazette, the presiding judges were alerted to the incident and ordered security to return the drawings and allow Gaongalelwe to continue citing that the artist was not distracting nor doing anything illegal.

More chapters will be published throughout 2012 focusing on Haitian politics, the role of NGO’s, and where relief money was spent (or not). Interestingly the comics will be published in English, French, and Creole.

PRI interviews Syrian cartoonist Ali Ferzat who is now in Kuwait recouping from the being beaten by Syrian authorities who attempted to silence the cartoonist by clubbing and breaking his hands. Accompanying story also includes a slideshow of his work and descriptions of some of the cartoons critical of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad that lead to the attempt to silence him. Story runs about 5 minutes.

From the Guardian:

Best known for his spiky comic drawings depicting the outrageous antics of the St Trinian’s girls, and for his illustrations of the Molesworth series, written by Geoffrey Willans and which, as any fule kno, tells of life at the boys’ prep school St Custard’s.

Searle “created an alternative to the conformity of Harold Macmillan’s Britain”, said his publisher Simon Winder. “He gave Britain in the 1950s particularly a sense of anarchy. He was extraordinarily sceptical about all forms of authority [and] there’s something just astonishingly anarchic about Molesworth and St Trinian’s,” said Winder. “That’s why they have appealed to so many generations.”