Pakistan restored access to Twitter Sunday after briefly blocking the microblog over posts that Islamabad said promoted a Facebook contest involving caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.

The website, which is widely used in Pakistan, was blocked by the telecoms authority on the orders of the IT ministry, with authorities accusing Twitter of refusing to remove posts about the Facebook contest.

But Mohammad Younis Khan, spokesman for Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) said on Sunday evening that access to Twitter had “been restored”, some 12 hours after it was cut off.

He said the IT ministry ordered the ban to be lifted and he did not know the reason for the decision. No one from the ministry or Twitter was immediately available for comment.

Conservative Muslim Pakistan has clashed with popular websites before. It blocked Facebook for almost two weeks in May 2010 over a competition to draw the Prophet, in a major row that also led to restrictions on other sites.

Speaking earlier Sunday before the ban was lifted, Khan said that there was “blasphemous material” on the site and that those responsible for the Facebook competition had been “trying to hurt Muslim feelings”.

“Both Facebook and Twitter were involved. We negotiated with both. Facebook has agreed to remove the stuff but Twitter is not responding to us,” he said then.

Facebook was also unavailable for comment.

In Pakistan, Twitter is used by prominent public figures such as celebrities, cricketers, cabinet ministers and members of parliament.

Former president Pervez Musharraf, in exile in Britain, regularly tweets, as does Interior Minister Rehman Malik, and Ali Zafar, the popular actor and musician. Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician, is also on Twitter.

The Ministry of IT on Sunday had also directed the telecommunication authority to remain alert and block immediately all links displaying what it deemed profane caricatures of religious figures.

Numerous users of Twitter in Pakistan however appeared to have circumvented the ban, most lashing out at what one poster on the website called a “corrupt and low calibre government”.

Pakistan’s 2010 Facebook ban was prompted by a similar competition organised by an anonymous user who called on people to draw the Prophet to promote “freedom of expression”.

The competition sparked a major backlash in Pakistan, where even moderates were deeply offended by the drawings that appeared on the “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day” Facebook page.

Facebook was blocked after a petition by a group of Islamic lawyers. The PTA also banned YouTube for a week and restricted access to other websites, including Wikipedia, lashing out against “growing sacrilegious” content.

Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous.

Muslims across the globe staged angry protests over the publication of satirical cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers four years ago.

A suicide attack outside the Danish embassy in Islamabad that year killed eight people. Al-Qaeda claimed the attack to avenge the cartoons.

Political cartoons are “on the frontline of freedom” as recent attacks on cartoonists in Iran and Syria showed, famous American cartoonist Kevin KAL Kallaugher told AFP in Bucharest.

The main reason is “because the job of a cartoonist is not to make you laugh but to make you think,” said the man who has caricatured the most powerful people in the world, from US President Barack Obama to German Chancellor Angela Merkel to Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

Kallaugher’s satirical drawings for The Economist and US daily The Baltimore Sun are featured in an exhibition that opened this week at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in the Romanian capital.

Ironically, the museum is located in the pharaonic palace built by former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a man who would not have tolerated any satirical cartoons.

“There are many countries in the world today, emerging democracies like Romania, that are grappling with this notion of how much freedom to allow and how much to endure this special kind of criticism that satire cartoons could bring,” said the cartoonist known as KAL who became in 1978 the first resident cartoonist of The Economist.

Since then, he has drawn about 140 covers for the British weekly and a total of 7,000 political cartoons.

“Last week, an Iranian cartoonist was sentenced to 25 lashes because he had drawn an Iranian politician as a football player,” Kallaugher said.

Amnesty International condemned the sentencing of cartoonist Mahmoud Shokrayi as an attack on freedom of expression, saying it sent “a chilling message to all Iranians”.

Kallaugher also pointed to the beating of Syria’s best known satirical cartoonist Ali Ferzat last year. Since the start of the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in March 2011, Ferzat had published drawings critical of the brutal crackdown on protesters.

“At the same time, in countries like India and Bangladesh, you see new freedom and new opportunities for cartoonists, so I have hope” for the future, Kallaugher said.

But the temptation to limit the freedom of cartoonists can even be found in long established democracies.

“Even in the US which prides itself for its democracy and freedom of speech, in the months that followed 9/11, there were a lot of people that would have been happy to censor those criticising voices,” Kallaugher said.

As Europe and the United States battle with the long-lasting effect of the economic crisis, cartoons that “capture the essence of what is really happening” are “crucial”, Kallaugher believes. They also help people to understand complex issues like the debt crisis.

But why do cartoons that are created to make you laugh at a situation have such an impact?

“Caricature takes powerful people and brings them down a notch. It is truly a democratic form and you are telling these people that they are not doing their job,” Kallaugher said.

“Laughter is a lubricant in the brain to allow you to accept things that normally you would reject,” he added.

“It is like when you meet someone and they have their arms closed and crossed in front of you, you know they are not listening to what you have to say but when they open their arm, their heart is open.”

“Laughter does the same, it opens up the brain,” he said.

The uproar over a cartoon in a school textbook and the undue haste shown by the government in withdrawing the book were both out of place and uncalled for. This, apart from other things, shows how little we know of our history and how poor we are in appreciating works of art.

Those attacking cartoons tend to forget that cartooning in India has had a long history and is firmly entrenched in society. A rough calculation will show that in over a century of its existence, nearly one million cartoons and caricatures have appeared in newspapers and periodicals in many languages and regions.

Cartoons by nature are forward-looking, democratic and secular in their approach and need no certificates from the government. Cartoons thrive on acceptability of their comments by a society which is far more mature.

Right from the days of the freedom struggle, cartoons have played an important role in mass awakening, stirring the minds of thinking people. To do this, at times, the ever uncompromising cartoonists have not shied away from taking a stand against governments and even their own papers’ editorial line.

This was particularly evident when the Babri mosque was razed and, 10 years later, during the Gujarat riots. I compiled two books of cartoons on the two events (‘Punchline’ and ‘Drawing the Battle Lines’). It was interesting that of over 5,000 cartoons I collected, not one favoured the mosque demolition or the killings.

The cartoonists have also come under attack for being fierce votaries of freedom of speech and expression. But such cases have been rare. During the Emergency (1975-77), cartoons were censored as if the government feared that its reputation was dented by their innocuous strokes.

Cartoons are a complex genre of art. Being a curious mix of humour, satire and political understanding, they are not produced just to make one laugh. They are different from caricatures. They look at the realities and make one think. Even when commenting on social issues, cartoons provide space for lateral thinking.

Since cartoons are works of art, they do not require captive audiences. Like any art work, it is their inherent magnetic strength and bare truth that draws people to them. It is their multi-layeredness that opens the doors for various interpretations. Some interpretations though could go totally haywire as happened in the case of the nearly 60-year-old Nehru-Ambedkar cartoon.

If the opposition to this cartoon was on the count of the captive audiences, like in schools, it may have been understandable. The opposition, however, was political and so needs to be condemned. A cartoon which was not opposed by the leaders figuring in it suddenly becomes hot potato because the politics of the day interprets it in its own way.

Equally distressing is the way the mass media chose to respond to the cartoon row. The media went overboard, seeing Satan where there was none. If the government acted in panic trying to avoid yet another controversy, the media appears to have played the game by the rules set by the government.

Cartoons in textbooks can be a subject matter for thorough discussion. Some, like the government of the day, may reject it outright but a blanket ban may not be the best answer. There may be a contention that one should have cartoons in textbooks, if one must, only in the higher classes when the level of maturity and capabilities for proper interpretation have adequately developed.

(18.05.2012 – Madhuker Upadhyay is an author and journalist. He can be reached on madhuker.upadhyay@gmail.com)