In 1948 the cartoonist K. Shankar Pillai founded Shankar’s Weekly, a magazine of political cartoons. Jawaharlal Nehru launched it. He is reported to have told the cartoonist: “Don’t spare me, Shankar.” Nehru then appeared in more than 4,000 of Shankar’s cartoons.
The weekly closed in 1975, about two months after the Emergency began. When he closed it, Shankar wrote: “Dictatorships cannot afford laughter because people may laugh at the dictator and that wouldn’t do.” Sources differ on why he closed it. ThePrint reports that Shankar himself named the cost of running a weekly, not the Emergency.