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'Laapataa Gents', 'Ordering a Spine': EC's Selective Silence Inspires Meme Fest

The jokes strike a chord in an atmosphere where the EC has been openly shirking its duties as a poll body in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Illustration: Memes and X posts on the EC.
Illustration: Memes and X posts on the EC.

Anyone found asking votes in the name Caste, Religion, Army, etc. apart from PM Modi, will be barred from elections.

Our job is to monitor elections & violations of any leader belonging to any party, but when it comes to PM Modi & BJP, they feel like family.

It should be noted that: “We believe in free & fair elections & we will take necessary action in terms of the Election MCC violation, only if the leader is from opposition.”

These are posts on X from an account with an evocative handle, ‘@ECISLEEPS’. It is an obvious play on the Election Commission’s X handle, @ECISVEEP. The posts, which have tens of thousands of likes, strike a chord in an atmosphere where the EC has been openly shirking its duties as a poll body in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

And it’s not just the one parody account. The EC ignoring communal hate speeches by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other BJP leaders day after day, asking X to take down a communal video posted by BJP Karnataka only after polling in the state was almost over, allowing Modi to almost lead a roadshow while going to vote and only penalising opposition parties for model code of conduct violations is not lost on online commentators. They have reacted in a universal language – memes.

As always, Bollywood is of perpetual help.

Coinciding with the Kiran Rao-directed Laapataa Ladies making its way to Netflix, a meme that has proven extremely popular is one that claims that the three election commissioners are missing gents – i.e. that they are missing from executing their own roles.

Other memes make use of this very photograph to show the commissioners as caged and displayed at Narendra Modi’s table or worse – replaced by Modi himself.

With the poll body largely understood to be kowtowing to the BJP’s wishes, another favourite – shared multiple times and not just by the author of the post shared here – is a mock order slip for a spine for the EC.

Political satirist @ms_medusssa has summed up the situation in a sketch depicting what the EC’s mother must have gone through had it been an Indian child. The sketch shows the youngster – ‘ECI’ – sleeping late, brushing teeth for an inordinate amount of time and playing video games as the mother exhorts it to take note of BJP’s hate speech, the BJP Karnataka video and a situation which can lead to more hatred. ‘ECI’, however, makes an exception in the gemlike final scene of the sketch.

Another skit attempts to show the EC’s selective action against opposition parties.


Cartoonist Satish Acharya too has pitched in noting the EC’s remarkable timing in asking X to take down the communal video posted by BJP Karnataka just as polls were ending in the state. The EC has yet not penalised BJP.

As jokes write themselves on the EC’s inaction, it was not long ago that the EC itself was making jokes. In March it recounted how a candidate named ‘Adolf Lu Hitler Marak’ was arrested by a police officer named ‘John F. Kennedy.’

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