The Indian comic in jail for jokes he didn't crack

In one of his shows, stand-up comic Munawar Faruqui cracks a dark joke about his native Gujarat state and the deadly religious riots of 2002.

"Junagadh is a very lazy city. People go for siestas, shops shut, nothing happens," Faruqui says of his hometown, a former princely state.

The comic, who is Muslim, says when he was a boy he was stuck at home for 12 days during a curfew in his mixed neighbourhood. A Hindu friend of his mother's was their only occasional company.

"We were eight kids in the house. I was happy because I didn't have to go to school. The electricity used to go, the phones went dead, the elders in the house were anxious about their safety. But when the riots ended, [we found] nobody died in Junagadh.

"You know why? People were too lazy to even riot."

The same couldn't be said of other parts of the state. More than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed when riots erupted after a train fire killed 60 Hindu pilgrims.

Faruqui, now 30, is part of India's evolving youthful and lively comedy scene. It's still rough around the edges and sometimes callow, but it bristles with energy and ambition and is unafraid to pull its punches. More importantly, it has begun to draw an audience who are willing to pay for an evening of jokes even from a relative newcomer like Faruqui. The problem is that not everybody appreciates a joke in India.