The Instagram account of The Savala Vada, a satirical meme page with over eighty thousand followers known for its sardonic, dark humour and sarcastic critiques of the Union government, has been withheld in India.
“Sup we just got banned from the world’s largest democracy,” The Savala Vada wrote on X, with hashtags #MotherOfDemocracy, #NotSatire and #SavalaVadaFried.
The Savala Vada, which has around 85,000 followers, is run by a Kerala-based 22-year-old creator who leads a small team of twenty-something university students, according to reports.
They produce memes that resemble the front page of a newspaper, with large headlines and images that usually reference current events and online discourse.
When users tried to access the page, it displayed the message, “Account withheld in India. This is because we complied with the legal request to restrict this content.”
“The Republic of India has finally vanquished Public Enemy #1: a meme page run out of a hostel dorm. Citizens of Bharat can rest assured that a government so petty to go after Instagram pages surely has the best interests of the nation at heart,” the team wrote satirically on their backup account.
Reflecting on the timing of the move, they remarked that “as India reels from issues concerning the foundations of its Constitution, Kangana Ranaut, civil unrest, plane tragedies, flooding in Assam, recent Bollywood movie plots, human rights abuses in the peripheries, food insecurity, Vir Das, caste atrocities and having the largest population of people below the poverty line, the Republic of India strongly asserts its priorities by politely asking Meta to take down a satire news page on Instagram.”
This story was originally published in maktoobmedia.com. Read the full story here.
