The gambling instinct is in all of us. So why make it illegal?

India is a nanny state. We see evidence of this in different areas of life every day. The official attitude to gambling is just another example. But it is an important example — because the moralistic attitude to gambling comes in the way of legalising it, and legalising gambling would do far more good than harm.

What our politicians fail to see — or choose not to see — is that it is human nature to gamble. Our prehistoric ancestors gambled everyday in their search for food and safe haven. The stakes were incredibly high because they gambled with their lives while they hunted or foraged in an environment which was at all times hostile. You could argue that this kind of gambling wasn’t out of choice, but what about the fact that amongst some of the oldest artifacts found by archeologists, there were little cubes that looked very much like dice?

Races featuring horses, dogs, camels and other animals have always been staged with the intention of laying wagers on the result. People bet on games of cards; whether they vary in skill depending on whether you play bridge or rummy is incidental. Housie is a form of gambling as is a raffle or Tambola. Slot machines, one-arm bandits, fruit machines… they all involve luck, which is the essence of gambling. And when you think about it, one of the biggest gambling devices thought up by the human brain is the stock market. Market players might argue that their trading activity is based on research and knowledge, but what study, however careful and however deep, can predict factors like the fury of nature or terrorist strikes, or any of the other extraneous factors that can throw the stock market into a tailspin?

Yet, in spite of all the evidence pointing to our intrinsic attraction to gambling, successive governments choose to regard it as an undesirable, even a sinful, activity, one which they should discourage and clamp down upon. They haven’t been able to, and won’t be able to, simply because it is an in-built part of the human psyche, much like sex.

Until recently, the only form of gambling or bettor allowed by the government was in horse-racing. That’s because the racing community went to court and won the case on the grounds that a fair amount of knowledge and a study of form and records was necessary to pick a winner. But doesn’t that apply to bettors in other sports too? If you bet that Spain would be the winner before the last World Cup, or if you put your money on England winning the next cricket World Cup or that Roger Federer will retain his Australian Open crown, would not all these bets be based on knowledge? So why can’t we place official bets on them?

However that ‘knowledge’ factor is irrelevant. The outlawing of gambling has given rise to an extensive underground network worth hundreds of crores. This is common knowledge. It is also common knowledge that the authorities make sporadic raids on gambling joints and bookies, seize evidence, and jail small-time operators, but everyone knows that this is just eyewash.

The existence of a vast illegal network contributes crores to the parallel economy. A network like this obviously attracts the mafia and other underworld elements. When that happens, there are bound to be other criminal activities that grow around it. This much is common sense. If so, why do governments tolerate it?

If an underground network is allowed to thrive before everyone’s eyes, it’s a sign of one of two things. The first: the government is powerless to control it. The second: the government does not want to control it.

My own guess is that it is a combination of both these factors. The government cannot control it because most underworld activities are like weeds in a garden; you root out one patch and soon there is another. As for not wanting to eradicate the underground network out of choice, the reasons are obvious. How many people, from the police to politicians, must benefit from turning a blind eye to the betting that goes on all around them all the time?

However, the menace of bookies and cricket match-fixing highlighted recently by Pakistani cricketers has brought this issue to the foreground. Take the example of England. It is a nation of people given to ‘a flutter’. They have football, cricket, horse and grey-hound racing on a very big scale, on all of which betting is legally permissible. This is so also in Europe and elsewhere. You can see what legitimacy can do: it immediately cleans everything up.

So why won’t our government think of bringing in similar legislation? It can’t be because the government does not want all the legitimate money — crores and crores of rupees — it will earn through taxes on gambling. Is being a nanny, and an inefficient one at that, worth all these crores?