NUISANCE AND SOCIAL DRINKING

From 2016, the Government of Goa – starting from the term of former Chief Minister Laxmikant Parsekar – has tried to tackle the menace of drunken tourists by legislating a ban on drinking in all public spaces which are notified as “No Alcohol Consumption Zones”. Of course the law has been implemented neither in letter nor spirit. About a month ago, it was reported that the Chief Minister, Manohar Parrikar planned to introduce another law that would impose even more stringent fines than before, and also amend the Garbage Management Act to tackle the joint problem of drunken nuisance and littering.

The 2016 amendment made to the Goa Excise Duty Act, 1964 confirms that the ostensible motive for banning drinking in public spaces is the nuisance created by drunken tourists. When the proposed amendment was introduced in the assembly, the statement of Objects and Reasons set out that the “Government is receiving a number of complaints of consumption of liquor in open spaces, public places, beaches, State and National highways; mostly by visiting tourists. Upon consumption of liquor, the bottles and cans are strewn around causing environmental degradation and…harm to pedestrians accessing the area. Such persons after being in an inebriated state, cause nuisance to general public, disturb the peaceful order in the area and cause local tension, thereby posing a law and order situation on regular basis. The Bill, therefore, seeks to empower the Government to declare a space/place/area in the State of Goa as ‘No Alcohol Consumption Zone’”.

Though the logic of the amendment seems justifiable and the fact that the government will declare a particular place as ‘No Alcohol Consumption Zone’ through a gazette notification as eminently transparent, the situation is not that simple. For one, while the amendment has made drinking in public a punishable offense, it has not properly defined the parameters of which spaces can be notified as ‘No Alcohol Consumption Zones’. Even if we concede that the spirit of the amendment is directed towards regulating the public space of a beach, it still proves to be problematic as many local Goans picnic on the beach with friends and family. They take along with them alcohol and food. Is this activity, part of the lives of Goans for so many years, also to be criminalized and made punishable by law? After all, the law is applicable to all, even if it was made because, or to stop the nuisance, of unruly tourists. In this context, Parrikar’s comment in September 2017, gives us cause for concern. He reportedly said, “If someone wants to drink (liquor), they should drink inside and not in public places”.

At this point, one needs to ask if the solution to unruly and drunk tourists – a problem that concerns law and order – will be solved by banning it in notified public spaces. The activity of drinking – or rather, social drinking – in itself is not the problem. The fact that the government feels that the problem will be tackled by giving more teeth to the Goa Excise Duty Act, 1964, which regulates the production and sale of alcohol and has nothing to do with public disorder, is itself suggestive of the manner in which the government views liquor consumption as a problem, and not the fact that tourists feel entitled to do as they please in Goa. In any case, the law will provide ample space for future police harassment of those who consume alcohol because consumption of alcohol is criminalized and not public disorder.

The ideology that the current government and many members of various political parties subscribe to is well-known. Of late many politicians across party lines have made crass and ignorant comments that appear to fly right in the face of the liberal and susegad ethos of Goa. In this context, the history of temperance movements in India can give us valuable insights as how political activism and the legislation of the state can end up creating a smokescreen by which various cultural practices end up as collateral damage.

In his doctoral study, “A World Without Drink: Temperance in Modern India, 1880-1940” (2013), Robert Eric Colvard discusses how the earliest protests against policies regulating the sale of alcohol were lead by toddy tapping communities and other communities traditionally producing alcohol. These protests were against unjust taxes imposed by the British, particularly against the Bombay Abkari Act, 1878, and not about the consumption of alcohol per se. However, a combination of Christian temperance activists with their Victorian morality and Indian nationalists essentially believing in a brahmanical Hindu morality created the fiction that the people in India were teetotalers. This fiction served the basis of the several prohibition laws in India and also created the notion that the consumption of alcohol was an aberration to Indian culture. And the bans that the government, both central and state, bring in force or plan to bring in force also rest on this idea that the consumption of alcohol is foreign to Indian culture.

In the context of Goa, the government seems to be unwilling to let go of the revenue it earns from liquor sale while at the same time wants to alter the place alcohol consumption has in Goan society. Even though the Goan government actively promotes local spirits, such as feni for export, we frequently hear such expressions of irrational fears as girls drinking, amongst others. This might lead us to wonder whether misguided attempts to curb unruly tourists may, in fact, end up slowly eroding one’s right to consume alcohol without causing a nuisance in a public space. The government has to take steps to maintain public order without interfering in the cultural rights of Goans.

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 28 February, 2018)

TEJAS EXPRESS: PUBLIC PROPERTY AND CIVIC DUTIES

The high-speed, high-tech Tejas Express, plying between Bombay and Goa, was launched a couple of weeks ago. The launch of this train was much hyped because it offered state-of-the-art facilities to the passengers. The Tejas Express boasts of automatic doors, infotainment screens, vacuum bio-toilets, touch-free taps in the toilets, and much more. While the train’s maiden voyage was expected to be a triumphant heralding of a new era in rail transportation, the news that filtered in afterwards suggested otherwise.

It was reported that even before the journey began in Bombay, a window pane was smashed. By the time the train reached Goa 12 headsets were reported to be missing or stolen; there was garbage littered all over the train, and the toilets were also reported to be filthy. Opinion-makers reacted stating that Indians do not deserve nice things and lack the civic sense to take care of public property. Given the manner in which urban Indian liberals are blind to the most fundamental problems of the society, it was not surprising to observe that absence of civic sense being discussed without reference to caste.

The Indian Railways is said to be the largest employer of manual scavengers in the country – under the guise of employing sweepers – as contract workers across the length of the rail network. Almost all of these people who dispose human waste with their bare hands come from the Dalit castes. Though manual scavenging has been outlawed by law since a long time ago, the Indian Railways only started addressing the issue – albeit incompletely – from 2016. In other words, if the railway platforms and tracks bear the slightest resemblance of ‘clean’ it is only because of the thankless and demeaning labour provided by thousands of workers from such castes. If guests on board the maiden journey of the Tejas Express had left behind garbage and dirty toilets and/or wash-basins it was only to be expected as that is how things are done – it is simply someone else’s problem.

The South Asian idea of cleanliness is that someone else is responsible for doing the cleaning. While it is true that the authorities are responsible for collecting and disposing of garbage, there is no justification for collecting wet waste in plastic bags and dumping them along the side of roads, for someone else to collect. There is blindness to the fact that the labour provided come from persons who are denied the basic right of human dignity, let alone benefits like health insurance and proper working conditions. This is a problem that concerns not only the government but everybody.

This behavior with regards to disposing garbage tells us something about the way in which Indians approach public spaces and public property. On the one hand, one doesn’t view public spaces and public property as deserving care and maintenance. On the other hand, the full burden of maintaining public spaces and property is dumped (pun intended) on the members of the most discriminated-against strata of society, who, not ironically, are excluded and pushed either to the margins or outside the boundaries of villages and cities. There is simply an absence of a ‘collective feeling’ or of a ‘community’ when the issue of public spaces emerges. The reason many argue, is the existence of the caste division. (In fact it was Dr. B. R. Ambedkar who argued that it was impossible to build a common community in the form of a nation when thousands of castes or jatis were in existence in British India).

In a slightly different context, the theologian Philip Vinod Peacock in his essay ‘Hostility, Hypocrisy, Hospitality: Rethinking the Politics of Theology and Hospitality from a Dalit Perspective’ (2013), offers an interesting suggestion to understand the relationship that Indians share with public spaces. Peacock suggests that public spaces, containing hundreds or thousands of people unfamiliar to us, tend to be sites of repelling strangers: “Within the caste system all strangers are automatically considered to be lower in the caste hierarchy than oneself.” Public spaces therefore are sites where aggressive behavior is displayed or performed that goes against any form of civil behavior, in response to the underlying structures of casteism. Thus, he further suggests that “it is perhaps this logic or spirit [of the caste system] that is at work when Indians jump queues or push themselves before others, or basically choose not to follow the norms of what can be considered publicly acceptable behavior”.

Peacock’s suggestion can be used to argue that the physical location of public spaces – be they parks, roads, beaches, trains or anything else – are sites or spaces wherein the development of civic sense is constantly subverted because we are unable to relate to one another as persons outside of our narrow and individualistic identities. There is something that prevents us from being publicly-oriented citizens. Being in a public space leaves us supposedly vulnerable to physical overpowering, caste pollution, and even diseases. This is the reason why public property is often repeatedly vandalized or left to decay without any care. In many ways, it can be argued that a sense and concept of the ‘public’ is yet to evolve within Indian society. 

The unfortunate episode of the Tejas Express is not an aberration; in fact, one of the maintenance staff remarked that the amount of garbage left behind was just like any other train. As expected the educated, ‘middle class’ who can afford such expensive fares are the ones who are causing all the problems.  

(First published in O Heraldo, dt: 7 June, 2017)