ARE PUBS AGAINST OUR CULTURE?

If political parties in different states, both ruling and opposition, are so dead against alcohol, why don't they just pass a law, banning alcohol from their states? Then the whole country will be liquor-free.


IN A country which is divided in opinion on almost every issue imaginable, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the statements made by certain political parties and ministers that the pub culture prevalent in India these days must be eradicated has triggered off a nation-wide debate. People are speculating as to what exactly is meant by ‘pub culture’; does it depend upon the social fabric of a country, varying from one country to another? Is it just another American concept making its way into our lives through constant and unmonitored exposure to American television?

Without understanding what is the ‘pub culture’ and how they, if at all, threaten to corrupt our morals and the image of India the political parties want to present to the whole world, we can never do something about it.

If political parties in different states, both ruling and opposition, are so dead against alcohol, why don’t they just pass a law banning consumption of alcohol from their states? Then the whole country will be liquor-free. They don’t, because alcohol brings in a lot of revenue.

Sometimes, they themselves consume alcohol and use it as a means to lure mostly the poor and uneducated to vote for them. Liquor companies also provide funding for election campaigns. This explains why politicians don’t ban alcohol in their states although nothing stops them from cracking down on young people drinking alcohol in pubs.

India being a secular country, one must look at the picture from different religious angles. While Islam imposes a strict religious ban on the consumption of alcohol, that is not the case in Hinduism. Historical evidence indicates that in the Vedic Age consumption of ‘Som rasa’, an alcoholic drink in religious as well as social gatherings offered to deities was common.

Even the Ayurveda mentions the usage of alcohol in making medicines, treating wounds, and herbal wines with numerous health benefits.

But the Hindu concept of dharma criticises the consumption of anything that causes harm to the body and the mind, and we are all aware of the adverse effects alcohol abuse has on our health and mental stability in the long run.

Thus, one can say that alcohol consumption is frowned upon by Hinduism but not strictly banned. So people, who are upholders of India’s glorious past can’t really justify their claims that alcoholism is alien to the Indian culture.

Gender-bias and alcohol consumtion is another important facet within the larger problem of alcohol consumption. To be fair, steps are being taken to realise the dream of complete emancipation of women in India. But the problem is we may not be a Taliban regime forcing our women to wear burqas, keeping them from talking to unknown men, but even today male hegemony exists, both in the minds of the people and in practice.

Men want to marry virgins, who don’t drink or smoke and in short are good wife material. They may not always be upfront about it but that’s how it is usually. If a man sees a beautiful woman at a bar, he might want to chat her up, ask her out, and spend months with her doing everything that mothers teach their daughters not to do before marriage. But he will not always want to take her home to his mother. To him, she is the epitome of everything ‘good girls’ shouldn’t ever be.

This is why the sight of women drinking at a pub still raises eyebrows in this country even if women continue to make their way to the parliament or to the moon. Drinking is still chiefly considered to be a male bastion.

To give a recent example, in 2009, some unruly mobs had entered a pub physically assaulting women sitting and drinking inside with their friends. They defended their move as a means to protect these women and their moral character from the evils of alcohol as well as from drunken men, who were supposedly bothering them.

But, if these men were so concerned about protecting the moral rights of the women, why do they lech at the same women on the streets, and clap and dance to item numbers with the raunchily-dressed girls? They might argue that the youth of today have taken to drinking excessively thereby ruining their health and their peace of mind. But why do these mobs drink alcohol themselves? Also, there were many men sitting inside that pub; why not attack them as well instead of targetting only the women?

Question is who gave these fringe political outfits the right to act as the moral police, that too by exercising such brutality? If rescuing women from the evils of alcoholism was the only motive, why were they molested in public? Modern women are quite capable of taking care of themselves.

In whatever way they try to justify their actions, one can safely say that the Indian society, the fundamentalists mostly, hasn’t yet been able to accept the idea of free-thinking women, who indulge in smoking, consuming alcohol and living life the way they want without following the diktats imposed on them by the males in their lives. The moment these men fear that their identity and their powers are being threatened, they unleash the most unimaginable forms of brutality on women to check their progress and activities.

These questions must be answered and addresses before taking drastic steps to curb the nuisance of alcoholism from the society. We must find out why such incidents occur before introducing the art of responsible social drinking is a must. A pub is a place where people go to have a drink to relax and meet friends. If alcohol is not anti-Indian, then how can pubs be so? In fact, one can say that they are doing their bit of good work by letting people drink indoors so that they don’t do that outdoors or at home, and create a mess in all their drunken glory.