Stop India's Ban Culture, says Palash Krishna Mehrotra
Girfriends are banned. Alcohol is banned. Books are banned. In Goa, a minister wanted bikinis to be banned from beaches. Where else does one wear a bikini? On Mount Everest?
As a nation we have many faults, but there's one thing at which we are better than anyone else: banning.
There's no other liberal democracy in the world that bans as much as we do. Last week too we went on a banning spree. The BCCI has declared that from now on girlfriends will not be allowed to accompany players on overseas tours. Kerala has announced a prohibition policy. It seeks to become a completely dry state within the next decade. And in Punjab, a film about Indira Gandhi's assassination has been banned from release.
Girfriends are banned. Alcohol is banned. Books are banned. In Goa, a minister wanted bikinis to be banned from beaches. Where else does one wear a bikini? On Mount Everest? What do we ban next? Mutton and chicken maybe. The most bizarre arguments are hustled in support of these bans. There is little discussion. Only swift action.
Take the ban on girlfriends and wives. Wives will now be allowed on tour but only for a limited period of time. The reason for this clampdown? The disastrous performance of our cricket team in England. As always, we look for causes where there aren't any. What a player does in his personal life has no bearing on his performance.
Rarely do we look at how other countries and sports handle the issue. We have a curiously isolationist approach to our problems. We want to be at home in the world, we want to take on the world on its terms, and then we go and say: what works for them, doesn't work for us. We are different. So Greg Chappell was evil because he didn't understand something called 'Indian cricketing culture'.
Really, a winning cricketing culture is a winning cricketing culture. There's not much that distinguishes world-beating teams from each other. They play the same sport. Skill, talent and mental strength are what matter the most.
In cricket, the most successful teams - South Africa, Australia, England- allow wives and girlfriends to accompany players on tour. Top tennis players Andy Murray, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic always travel with their partners. In the recently concluded football World Cup, teams like Germany and Holland fared much better than teams like Russia, which disallowed players from taking along their girlfriends and wives.
The real problem of course lies somewhere else - the way cricket is administrated in India. It lies in the dead wickets on which our players grow up playing. It kills our fast bowlers. Then we complain we don't have fast bowlers. Our batsmen cannot handle green wickets with pace and bounce, and where the ball seams around. The best players are often not in the playing XI. What do we do? We go after the girlfriend. And we make some cosmetic changes. Bowling coach Joe Dawes and 'fielding consultant' Trevor Penney have been asked to 'take a break', and replaced with Bharat Arun and R Sridhar. Who are they? This, we are led to believe, will change the face of Indian cricket.
Alcohol
On a different note, Kerala has come up with the shock decision to ban alcohol. It is the state with the highest liquor consumption in the country. The move it is said will put a curb on several social evils. It is the magic wand that will prevent sex crimes. Apparently everyone who drinks creates mayhem on the streets. It will stamp out alcoholism.
The move can only backfire. The liquor industry will go underground. In Gujarat, the bootleg industry is pegged at Rs 1,500 crores annually. Spurious liquor will flood the market. People will flock to bars on the border. The state will lose the more than Rs 7,000 crores that it presently earns in revenue. The tourism industry will collapse.
Prohibition has failed in other states like Haryana, Mizoram and Andhra Pradesh. They've all had to roll back the policy. As for tackling alcoholism as a public health issue, banning is not the way forward. Ironically, it's the high taxes that the state imposes, that forces people to drink harmful spirits: overpriced ethyl alcohol.Instead, the government should lower taxes on beer and wine, thus encouraging people to shift to less harmful options. Expecting people to stop drinking is an impractical and utopian idea. But one can make them change their drinking habits.
Liberties
Countries like England and Ireland, which have had a problem with binge drinking, have not banned alcohol but launched social campaigns to educate drinkers about the ill effects.
Let me conclude with two observations. First, what a person drinks at home, or who a cricketer travels with on tour, are both matters of personal choice. You cannot trample on the individual civil liberties of a citizen, no matter what, but in India we do just that.
Two, we are very bad problemsolvers. We take a problem and then spin circles around it, whether it be alcoholism or the bad performance of our cricket team. We are terrible at diagnosing the real problem and fixing it. It's how we approach the issue of urban development. We build a ring road around the city. Then we keep driving around this ring road on a loop. Meanwhile, the diseased city in the middle continues to fester and sink.
The writer is the author of The Butterfly Generation