INDIA’S CRUEL, ILLIBERAL ATTITUDE TO ALCOHOL
Iam struggling to find the right adjective. Is the Indian State’s attitude toward alcohol contradictory? Is it illiberal? Is it anachronistic? Or is it, in fact, all three? Which is why, I will settle for troubling. That’s true in two senses. It’s morally — even logically — hard to understand and it also causes many of us a lot of trouble.
I suppose it all goes back to the contradiction between our constitutional view of drinking and the critical role it plays in filling the State’s coffers. Article 47 of the Constitution requires the State “to bring about prohibition”. This is the moral, paternalistic and illiberal goal our founding fathers laid down. But because the revenue earned from every bottle we imbibe is a critical component of government funds, temperance is just a moral direction, not law, except in Gujarat. In Delhi, for instance, the tax on liquor is 14.1% of the city government’s projected revenue for this year.
Not surprisingly, government policy oscillates between these two poles, the moral stance of abstinence and the need for easy, reliable, if not also everincreasing, revenue. And because politicians are unable to take a clear and firm stand, we keep bouncing between the two poles, sometimes even trying to reach both at the same time.
This simple exegesis explains the mess we’ve got into. To begin with, we should never have prohibited the sale of alcohol at the start of the lockdown. In every other self-respecting democracy, alcohol is considered an essential item, as much as food or medicine. After all, people like it, want to drink it and have a right to do so. But, alas, the moral strain in Indian politics came to the fore. On this issue, at least, our governments believe that they know better than us. So, we stopped all alcohol sales.
Five weeks later, when the exchequer was near collapse and its coffers empty, the government changed its mind. The sale of alcohol was permitted. But the paternalism that determines how we view popular taste retained its hold. So rather than opening all points of sale, we barely permitted 20%. In Delhi, only 150 shops selling liquor out of a total of 863 raised their shutters. That guaranteed we would have a problem.
Any thoughtful politician would have known after five weeks of forced abstinence, the demand for drink would be explosive. So rather than restricting the number of shops that cater to this hunger, they should have thought of creative ways of doubling or tripling them. And if the government is genuinely concerned about
“do gaz” social distancing, this is another good reason for increasing the number of off-licences. But our governments did the opposite. After stoking demand to frightening levels, they shrank supply to almost a trickle!
And then guess what? Once it realised how desperate we are for a tot, the Delhi government decided to truly make us pay for it. With a gleam in its eye that was impossible to disguise at the prospect of empty coffers soon overflowing, it slapped a 70% “special corona fee”! And it did so in the dark hours of the night. The details reveal just how heartlessly opportunistic this move is. The 70% will apply to “the maximum retail price of all categories of liquor”.
Frankly, there’s a lot that diminishes our democracy, but now that I’ve put my mind to it there are few grounds that match up to the cruel and illiberal foolishness of our attitude to alcohol.
Cruel because it denies people what they want, like and, often, need. Foolish because you can’t change tastes and definitely should not try to do so in the middle of a pandemic. And illiberal because as adults we have a right to decide for ourselves. If we can vote in or vote out governments, we can certainly handle a drink or two or three!
If only I could end with cheers!
Last Sunday, a friend of mine was in a group which was driven on official business from Delhi to Lucknow. As I have not seen a single report of a long drive and I am locked down in a containment area, I asked him to take notes on what he saw. He was not allowed to stop and interview anyone. All along the 416 km route, he saw migrant workers and their families walking to their homes, most of them were in groups, some alone. The old hobbled supported by sturdy sticks; some younger men, drenched in sweat, for it was a sunny Sunday, carried heavy bags strapped to their backs; others carried sacks on their heads. Babies and young children were held in the arms of their parents, older children clasped their parents’ hands. At a village called Brijghat in Hapur district, the police manhandled young cyclists trying to get past a barricade. My friend’s vehicle was stopped at barricades and checked by the police each time he crossed the borders between districts. All dhabas and shops were closed. Drinking water was only provided at two places. At one place, Sikhs had established a langar and were providing food for the walkers. Within Lucknow, the police checking was intensified but walkers were still to be seen on the ring road.
Nearly six weeks after the first lockdown was announced, this was the scene on the road between the capital of India and the capital of its most populous state. Migrant workers, dismissed by employers, enjoying no protection from their governments, often thrown out of their accommodation by their landlords, in urgent need of food transport and money, driven by desperation to walk home. It is a scene many have described as reminiscent of the migration at Partition. This is the outcome of the largest and one of the strictest lockdowns in the world enforced during the coronavirus disease crisis — a lockdown that has been widely applauded internationally.
Why has the outcry against this suffering inflicted on men and women who are more than 90% of India’s workforce been so muted?
It is, I believe, in part at least, because those in a position to raise their voices have not identified themselves with those who are suffering. This idea came to me from re-reading DH Lawrence’s once-controversial novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover during the lockdown. Set in the industrial midlands of Britain between the two World Wars, the novel is the story of a titled woman’s love for the working-class gamekeeper on the estate of her husband, a mine owner.
One of the themes is the lack of engagement and empathy between the upper-class and the working class as they were known in those days. During a row with her husband over his attitude to the servants, Lady Chatterley says, “I’d have you be aware of people.” He replies, “And I’d have you a little less aware of that kind of people and a little more aware of the people who are after all of your own sort and class.” One of the gamekeeper’s friends asks Lady Chatterley, “Do the upper classes feel any sympathy with working men as has nothing before them, till they drop. Do they sympathise?”
The migrant worker crisis has shown the relevance of that question in today’s India. The economist Jean Dreze, who has dedicated his life to the study of poverty and inequality, said on News18, “The lockdown has been like a death sentence for the underprivileged”, and maintained that “the policies made to contain the pandemic have been made or influenced by a class of people who pay little or no attention to the consequences for the underprivileged.” Nikhil Dey, who along with Aruna Roy, has worked for many, many years empowering workers and farmers put this lack of sympathy even more bluntly. In an NDTV debate on the migrant crisis, he said, “We are not thinking of them as human beings.”