Trupti Desai, the activist who is fighting for the right of women to enter all temples in India, has announced that she will direct her energies next towards bringing in a total liquor ban in Maharashtra.
On the face of it, this sounds almost right. An activist, worried that women suffer most from the alcoholism menace that plagues the country, decides to campaign for prohibition. Indeed, one of the first poll promises that J. Jayalalithaa has kept has been to shut down 500 Tasmacs (government liquor outlets) and delay opening times for the rest by two hours, a move that is seen as a nod to her fiercely faithful women voters.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple, is it? If you believe in freedom, you have to advocate it everywhere, regardless of how unpleasant some outcomes might be. For instance, however much we might want to throw the foul-mouthed Bhakt on Twitter into a vat of hot oil, we have to resist and defend instead his freedom of speech.
Banning liquor looks like a quick-fix solution to Tamil Nadu’s crippling alcoholism problem, but the truth is it is not a real solution at all. And fighting for prohibition in the name of women’s rights is only a pleasing chimera that has little to do with feminism or female empowerment.
Many liberal voices too support prohibition on emotional grounds; they argue that they have seen women suffer at the hands of alcoholic spouses; the physical abuse, the income lost, the families destroyed. But these are liquor-exaggerated manifestations of what is essentially an exploitative patriarchy. When women become the de facto, default victims of an alcoholism problem that rages among a society’s males, the genesis of it is an unequal gender equation, not liquor availability.
Prohibition failed spectacularly in the U.S. in the 1920s and 30s because it didn’t reduce the consumption of alcohol (except in the first year); it simply changed how alcohol was consumed. Bootlegging proliferated, moonshine joints rose everywhere, and crime and gang warfare increased dramatically. There is no fresh evidence to suggest that things will be any different here and today.
Anecdotal data from Kerala shows that men cross the border to drink, get just as drunk, and are as abusive at home as before. In fact, if anything, alcoholic men waste more household money in prohibition regions — on smuggled liquor, bribes and transportation. All it does is drive the problem underground.
None of this is to deny that a dire alcoholism problem does exist. But harmful social practices are mediated by prevailing cultures; so unless society frowns upon marital abuse per se , drunken abuse won’t stop. Question the fisherwoman or flower-seller in your neighbourhood and you’ll get a standard response: ‘He is a man, amma . That’s what they do; they drink and hit’. We need education and awareness creation to overturn this prevailing social covenant that violence from the man, drunk or otherwise, is acceptable.
Rather than a vaguely hopeful and flatteringly virtuous abstinence policy, what’s needed is a proactive, multi-pronged approach that educates society about the effects of liquor and about safe drinking. That enforcesstringentlaws to regulate the legal age and time limits for drinking, drunken driving, and drunken behaviour in public places. That takes complaints about marital abuse seriously and follows up with strict penalties. NREGA payments, for instance, could be made only into the wife’s account, or white-collar employers notified if someone clocks up more than three complaints of abuse. Health, education, and social service departments have to work in tandem.
Alcoholism-related crime against women and families is not an isolated monster that can be stopped by denying it alcohol. It is simply one of the more visible symptoms of a wider and older malaise.
