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ShareCuriously, Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot started the spirited fight against booze. Former CM Vasundhara Raje Scindia, ironically a BJP woman, had been pampering the booze-brigade, he grumbled. But now all that nonsense would stop. Pubs are not part of Rajasthan's culture, he roared. Just as girls and boys holding hands in public is not. Such rubbish would have to go. It energised Karnataka's BJP CM BS Yeddyurappa.
"We will not allow pub culture to grow in Karnataka," he announced, a decade and a half after Bangalore (now Bengaluru) had established itself as India's pub hub. "Pub culture is not desirable in India," chorused his home minister VS Acharya. Then the embarrassing Anbumani Ramadoss, Union health minister, blundered in making well-meaning but utterly ridiculous noises. "The pub culture must stop," he said. "It is not our culture." And went on to explain how the National Alcohol Policy will soon set all that right.
Now, as a humble citizen ruled by such HonMins, I am delighted that they have found a solution to our problems. But being an ignorant woman badly influenced by alien cultures (from the Aryans through the Mongols to the British) I am curious to know which Indian culture they are talking about. If we just step out of the narrow, middle class mandirs and masjids of urban, middle-Indian values, we would encounter the fantastic range of cultures our country offers. In some, drinking alcohol is very natural for both men and women.
Anyway, even for the moral police drinking and pubbing was fine all these years, till the HonMins discovered to their horror that some of those happy pubbers in pants were in fact women. The focus shifted quickly from the molesters to the molested, from the moral police to the pubs they target. (So we can now look forward to all art galleries being closed down, since the moral police traditionally attack exhibitions, especially if featuring MF Husain.) And 'Indian culture' will be glorified.
As a humble, ignorant woman, I expect that means we, especially enthusiastic Rajasthan, will bring back sati (a cultural tradition they are so proud of that even 20 years after the outrage over Roop Kanwar's death, stray incidents of sati keep cropping up), ban widow remarriage, quickly re-disempower the lower castes and girls, stop inter-caste marriage, restart bonded labour and open authentic Indian pubs for ganja, charas and other traditional intoxicants. We will also ban democracy, since that was never really 'Indian culture', and bring back feudalism. That way we can get rid of all our HonMins at one go, and start afresh.
Would that work? Sure. We will draw strength from the most deep-rooted part of Indian culture, the engine that drives our HonMins: corruption. Once empowered by the 'Indian culture' that the HonMins value the most, how could we ever lose?
Antara Dev Sen is Editor, The Little Magazine.
Contact: sen@littlemag.com
