As I lay in my bed in New Delhi yesterday morning, I found myself scrolling through my Instagram story feed on 'autopilot mode'. My eyes rested for a quick instant on a cartoon, but seconds before I could register its creator, the feed moved on and I'm not tech-savvy enough to know how to retrieve it, except from memory. There were two panels in a single frame; on the left was an image of a member of a lynch mob. On the right was the drawn figure of an activist.

The murderer on the left was scot-free and had been garlanded; a reference to a recent incident when a Harvard-educated minister, Jayant Sinha, offered sweets to and garlanded seven convicts sentenced to life by a Jharkhand court for lynching a man on suspicion of beef trading. Sinha had performed this grotesque, ceremonious gesture after the seven men had been granted bail. In the cartoon, the activist in the panel to the right had been imprisoned. It was a poignant, artful image, because within a span of just a few seconds it managed to communicate with great visual effectiveness how we are living in a dystopian time when the very idea of justice and humanity has been successfully inverted. The cartoon was clearly a response to the recent raids and arrest by the Pune police of human rights activists across six states in India.