MUMBAI, India
For more than a month, Munawar Faruqui, a tousled-haired, 30-year-old comic, languished in jail for a joke he didn’t tell.
Faruqui was beginning to make his name in the crowded ranks of India’s up-and-coming stand-up comedians. More than half a million people subscribed to his YouTube channel, where his performances feature an edgy mix of social and political commentary, one-liners and takedowns of religious fundamentalism delivered in rapid-fire Hindi.
The trouble started on New Year’s Day, when Faruqui took the microphone at a cafe in the central city of Indore. Just as he was beginning his set, a man wearing a white shirt and unzipped vest walked onstage and began harassing the comedian, accusing him of insulting Hinduism.
MUMBAI, India
Sunita Malik sat in the driver’s seat of her tractor, parked behind a police barricade at the edge of India’s capital.
She and her husband had come 60 miles from their farm in northern India to the gates of New Delhi, where hundreds of thousands of farmers have camped out for two months in bone-chilling cold in one of the biggest protests in the country’s history.
They are demanding that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government withdraw legislation aimed at boosting private investment in India’s heavily regulated farm sector, on which half of India’s 1.4 billion people depend for their livelihoods. They fear the laws will undermine the government price supports that prop up small-hold farmers and open the door to a corporate takeover of agriculture.