Thank you for banning smoking

So says Mythili Bhusnurmath, praising Anbumani Ramadoss, the man who is (unfortunately) “out in the cold.” Unfortunately, she’s not being sarcastic-

Anbumani Ramadoss, former health minister is out in the cold. Unsung! Unlamented! But there are two things for which the maverick minister will long be remembered: the zeal with which he fought the All India Institute of Medical Sciences director Dr P Venugopal and the equal zeal with which he campaigned against tobacco consumption. If the first showed him at his petty best, the second showed a surprisingly public-spirited side that few expect to see in our political class.

While his almost personal vendetta with Venugopal has been forgotten by all save, perhaps, Venugopal and Ramadoss, his other legacy, the battle against tobacco consumption, lives on. “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones”, lamented Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. But for once the bard was wrong! Sometimes the good does live on, as in the case of Ramadoss.

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According to the Advocacy Forum for Tobacco Control, smoking kills nine lakh Indians every year. To the extent these are in large part avoidable deaths, it is incumbent on government to use whatever means at its disposal, short of an outright ban, to curtail the consumption of tobacco.

Ramadoss as an epitome of the good. I am flabbergasted. He, no doubt, will be flattered.

Devdas

Anurag Kashyap (Black Friday, No Smoking) is making “Dev.D”; Sudhir Mishra (Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, Iss Raat Ki Subah Nahin) is making “Aur Devdas”.

Ramesh, on the other hand, has his own take on the story – paternalistic megalomaniac meet loser – Ramadoss meets Devadoss.

Self-righteous lunacy

While Lal Krishna Advani is the master of the foot-in-the-mouth maneuver, the BJP has done one up on him – it has managed to perform the anatomically impossible task of shoving its head up its own arse. And I am not talking about its position on the nuclear deal. BJP president Rajnath Singh has blamed the violence against Christians in Orissa and Karnataka on “Hindu anger”–

“Hindu anger and resentment against large-scale forcible conversions is the root cause of anti-Christian riots in both the states,” he said. He was convinced it could end only if strong measures were put in place to “stop forcible, or by allurement, conversions of Hindus by Christian missionaries”.

He said every conversion should be verified to ensure that missionaries have not forced a person or offered any sort of allurement to convert a Hindu to Christianity.

“The government should look into finding a way to verify this. Whenever a Hindu converts to Christianity, there should be verification by district authorities to the state that the conversion is not by force or after extension of any allurement such as promise of money or food.

“There should be a verification document with the person who has been converted. If such a system is put in place, there will be no opportunity for this sort of violence.”

Should the police also start a daily door to door verification campaign to see if women have not been raped or beaten, property has not been stolen etc instead of letting the affected people come and register a complaint? This is fascism, pure and simple, and Singh is treading on dangerous territory here. If attacks on Christians are justified on the basis of “Hindu anger”, is Islamic terrorism justifiable on the basis of “Muslim anger”, Naxalism on the basis of “class conflict”? Such stupid statements were to be expected from the BJP though.

The Congress-led UPA on the other hand is trying to see what political benefits it can gain from incidents of murder, rape and church burning. Should the Bajrang Dal be banned or not? In pondering this question, it has let murderous goons and arsonists run amok and failed to protect the citizens. The flareup in Assam and the attitude of Assam’s Nero only goes to show that when it comes to protecting the life and property of citizens, both political formations follow similar lines of thought.

In another development, megalomaniac Ramadoss is now planning to start a campaign against alcohol, and he is waving the Indian Constitution to make his point-

“The Constitution mandates all states to exercise prohibition but except J&K and Gujarat none of the states follow it. Prohibition is a state subject, I would urge all state governments to enforce to (sic) total prohibition.”

“Don’t encourage these despots”, Sauvik Chakraverti writes. He blames India’s reich wing press for having encouraged Anbumani Ramadoss by endorsing his perverse smoking ban. Regarding the Hindutva wackos, he says -“The country will become a Living Hell is (sic) these rascals who exploit faith are not put down by the mainstream press.” Read his whole post.

Further, the VHP and some organization that calls itself the “Global Human Rights Council” (the VHP and a human rights organization? Partners?) have together filed a complaint against Harbhajan Singh and Mona Singh for having danced in a reality show dressed up as Ravana and Sita. And the crazy part is a magistrate has admitted the criminal complaint.

The 5000 year old “rich Hindu civilization” is hurt when someone spoofs mythological characters; the Indian government cannot tolerate videos that show a performer dressed up as Gandhi doing a pole dance; and by failing to protect freedom of expression, the Indian constitution allows the Indian State to unleash a reign of terror on the flimsiest of reasons.

If India has to survive, it needs to be saved from two of its biggest enemies – its people, and its constitution.

Megalomaniac

India’s billion plus population means everything we do or encounter will automatically find its way into the record books. And that’s what has happened with the nonsensical Ramadossian anti-smoking crusade – its now the world’s biggest public smoking ban. Comments on this Churumuri poll show what most people feel about it. There are a few voices of sanity (including my extremely cynical one), but they are, well, few.

The Pioneer editor Chandan Mitra, the one who demanded that Swaminathan Aiyar, Vir Sanghvi and others who wrote about the secession of Kashmir be tried for treason, writes against the smoking ban–

Besides jihadi terror, another kind of terror has just been let loose on urban India. Both the police and vigilante squads are on the prowl to satiate the megalomania of the Union Health Minister. I can’t smoke in my office premises, not even on the terrace or balcony leave alone a secluded private chamber. I can’t go to a bar to enjoy a couple of drinks with friends, nor can I light up in a restaurant while I wait for food to be served or after a satisfying meal. It is still not clear whether hotels will be allowed to earmark some smoking rooms, but I am certain that Adolf Hitler’s worthy Indian follower will think of some devious plan to prosecute hotels if they do.

I am not comparing Ramadoss to Hitler in jest. Unlike his peers in an age where smoking was the norm rather than the exception (Allied leaders Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt and Josef Stalin were all smokers), the German dictator pathologically despised the habit. Although he did not go quite so far as Ramadoss, the Nazis banned smoking at party meetings and told members to aggressively “persuade” smokers to abandon the addiction. A massive publicity blitz was launched by the Nazi Government to make people aware of the evils of smoking. How miserably Hitler failed in his mission is apparent from the fact that Germany still has rather liberal anti-smoking laws. Earlier this year, the State of Bavaria scrapped the regulation prohibiting smoking in bars and public places, citing both economic and practical reasons.

Ramadoss is a megalomaniac – no question about it; he is the nanny paternalists have always dreamed about. And after letting the law loose on smokers, he now wants to place a ban on tobacco products, but after providing “alternative employment” to the thousands of tobacco farmers. So till this unachievable goal is met, the sin taxes will keep on piling and farmers can grow the crop that “kills”. Nothing contradictory about the whole thing, right? If a ban is indeed imposed, however, the trade will go underground, prices will rise, the quality will go down, and people will be harassed just like marijuana and opium users are (BJP leader Jaswant Singh had to face the heat after being charged under the dangerous Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act).

As it is, with the present smoking ban, some cops might find it more lucrative to slap challans (or not slap them rather) on smokers instead of tackling other crimes. To their credit, some police departments have complained about having better things to do than babysitting smokers – we don’t want a repeat of the Maharashtra fiasco where RR Patil sent his cops out to grab bar girls, and a few days later bombs went off in local trains around Mumbai. Stretching things too far I accept, but shouldn’t the police concentrate on tackling violent crimes instead of harassing couples fondling each other, or swindling college kids with “pictures” on their mobile phones?

There could have been a very simple answer to the whole mess – privatize all public property. So owners will set the rules on what is and what is not permissible on their premises. Business men who smoke can even decide against hiring non-smoking crusaders – equal opportunity employer status be damned! The only problem? The Indian Government does not respect private property – how else would you explain restaurants, pubs, bars, private offices etc being termed as “public space” or “public” whatever? And Sauvik Chakraverti puts his finger on this very problem.

Update: Fixed minor errors.

The right to smoke

Anbumani Ramadoss will never give up on his crusade of forcing people to do things that they are simply not willing to do. The notification that bans smoking in “public places” is part of the same agenda. But it would be wrong to place the entire blame at his feet. The undemocratic Indian public and the framers of the Indian constitution are the guilty parties here. India is a perfect example of mob rule – what the majority demands becomes the law. The fact that the anti-smoking law will be implemented from October 2nd, Gandhi’s birthday, shows that these people are not ashamed of using Gandhi’s name in this perverse enterprise.

Gandhi, although he believed in socialism, and had his own view of ethics, stood for non-violence and his level of tolerance was astounding – something today’s Indian will neither understand nor practice-

“Gandhi is always on the progressive side of things,” India’s Socialist leader, Jai Prakash Narain, told me only a few days before the murder. “Gandhi is our mightiest force against all the most backward elements in Indian society.”

Like Marx, Gandhi hated the state and wished to eliminate it, and he told me he considered himself “a philosophical anarchist.” But he was a practical socialist in that he never opposed the state as a necessary instrument in achieving social democracy, though democracy as he understood it is certainly not to be confused with the kind of police state ruled by the Kremlin…

“Strictly speaking,” Gandhi once said, “all amassing or hoarding of wealth above and beyond one’s legitimate requirements is theft. There would be no occasion for theft, and therefore no thieves, if there were wise regulations of wealth and absolute social justice.”

He wanted social ownership of large industry combined with a co-operative agrarian economy and small industrial co-operatives such as those in China that I had told him about. But he wanted the state to take over by peaceful means, and he “would not dispossess moneyed men by force, but would invite their co-operation in the process of conversion to state ownership. There are no pariahs in society. Whether they are millionaires or paupers, the two are sores of the same disease.”

And that is why while Gandhi looks down from the walls of our courts, police stations and government buildings, injustice and the application of intolerable coercion is the standard practice, all in the name of upholding the law. There is no law greater than natural law. Any law that is based on whims and that reduces an individual to a helpless beggar is perverse. But that is how our system works – that is how democracy works.

ITC and the Indian Hotels Association have challenged the ban in the Supreme Court arguing “that the notification makes no distinction between private space and public space.” And they are right. But I am not too optimistic when it comes to the Supreme Court. It comes up with some of the strangest decisions because it is working within the confines of a self-contradictory constitution. Here is a comment a reader leaves on the Times of India website-

Is it just me or does anyone else feel that the best seats in restaurants are ‘always’ reserved for smokers? All the attention for passively engaging death to those that do not smoke. Perhaps lets just forget the candle light and breathe clean air! Ban the smoke – Just once, Ramadoss you are right! Lets ban the butts!

Its their restaurant and they have the right to allocate seats any which way they want. This person probably assumes that restaurants are some kind of public service and that they are living on people’s charity.

The answer to the argument is very simple. If you don’t want to smoke, don’t patronize restaurants that don’t practice segregation – that is the free market way of approaching things. People don’t visit non-vegetarian restaurants if they are not-interested in non-veg food, do they? But this solution will not be acceptable because it is not sadistic enough.

The perverse among us Indians (and they are in a majority) like to see the virtual blood flowing when free men are cut down using legal swords – its like watching a gladiatorial combat. That is what the ban is all about. The law is not a product of ignorance but one of pure malice. And giving those who clamor for it the benefit of the doubt is an insult to those who believe in freedom.

“Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms,” Aristotle said. India is a republic in name, an ochlocracy in practice and is merrily on its way to a despotic future. Come to think of it, the same can be said of every country in the world.