The Nation wants to ban

It's our instinctive reaction: have problem, ban something.It solves nothing, and leaves Indians getting on with life at certainty of violating the law.

Uber app on a phone | Commons

Unlike the most popularly authoritative five-word assertion made at prime time, and which the heading of this column pretends to imitate, mine is not a demand or an inquisition. It is just a statement of fact. Because what do we Indians do when we are angry, scared, irritated, under-confident and short of ideas on how to handle a problem? We ban it. The ban is our favourite panic manoeuvre. The politician says, see, the sledge-hammer, no less. The professional outrage-peddler is satisfied because all he wanted was somebody’s head to add to his trophy wall. And the aam admi, of course, he applauds even if it means nothing to him.

Except, last week, the capital’s aam aurat was not unthinkingly applauding the latest in our ban-mania. Because it curtails her freedom and options and does nothing to enhance her security. It is useful to recall the sequence of events. First, Delhi Police issues a notice to Uber, the taxicar aggregator/operator, to help with investigation. As criticism of its own failure builds, it bans Uber services.

Then, as many begin to laugh at them, and others, particularly Delhi’s working women, get furious, they ban Ola, Quick, Delhi Cab-and several others. If you decide to be stupid, better to be even-handed about it. It takes Delhi’s growing population of working women back five years, and leaves them at the mercy of the old yellow-top rattle-traps. Remember the days when you took a “prepaid” taxi at a police-supervised booth at Delhi airport or railway stations, and the driver, usually accompanied by a flunkey on the front seat, stopped midway and asked for more money? He started with a sob story about petrol being so expensive, but if you were not impressed, he became menacing. It was intimidating if you were a family travelling at night. And a single woman.

Sure, Uber has much to explain, about its diligence and responsibility. But to ban it first, then serve an FIR under Section 420 of IPC for cheating and follow that up by banning the rest is so Indian. Home Minister Rajnath Singh has called for an open season on cab companies by nudging other cities and states as well to ban them, a response so churlish it would have sounded better coming from a clown like R.R. Patil, the former home minister of Maharashtra who wasted a decade enforcing his ban on Mumbai’s dance bars and failed. And when Lashkar-e-Toiba came visiting the city under his watch, he told us to calm down as little things did sometimes happen in big cities. But from an experienced, wise Rajnath, who has been chief minister of India’s largest state? Unless the hope was that this would quickly take away attention from his ministry’s failure in Sukma against Maoists just the previous week. OK, I may be over-stating my point here. But no doubt that it has helped his cleverest charge, Delhi Police, shift attention away from the crux of the problem, which is how a man with a record of prior rape charges got an all-clear certificate. The larger tragedy here is that exactly as with the December 16 case two years ago, the real conversation that should have followed, about making public spaces and facilities safe for women, never took place. It shifted at once to retribution-castrate them, hang them in public. It also gave us an under-cooked new rape law. Now it has moved to “foreign-owned” taxi services. If the same gang is going to issue fresh taxi-cab licences now, better for women to plan staying at home past sunset, or bulk-buy pepper spray.

We are an establishment of ban-maniacs. We ban more things than any other genuine democracy. Be it a book, a movie, an ad, a play or indeed even a taxi service, we ban it the moment somebody objects. We first confect such complex legal and regulatory frameworks that nobody can navigate without tripping. Ask mail order retailer Amway-whose American CEO spent jail time in Andhra-or the newly shining e-commerce companies. They are attracting billions in foreign capital, but multibrand retail is still illegal. Now somebody simply has to challenge them with a swadeshi PIL. Or better still, some cop some place- I hope not in Bangalore-has to wake up the wrong side of the bed and arrest them for breaking the law. Then somebody will simply ban these foreign-funded “thugs”.

 

I write this waiting for my flight at Ahmedabad airport, so it is apt to talk about our misty popular bank on liquor. Gujarat has total prohibition. Why? Because Mahatma Gandhi is a son of Gujarat, nobody can drink here. But no problem in the rest of the country where a billion-plus children of the Father of the Nation live. Someone explain to me how this works. Of course, if you ask any Gujarati, particularly your taxi driver, he will switch to problem-solving mode.

“There is a ban on liquor, sir, but none on bootlegging, ” mine tells me. And if I have issues with that, as an outsider, I can get a permit. I only have to confess in writing that I am an alcoholic. You can be sure an entire hafta economy works around these permits in Gujarat. It may indeed be more fun too to defy the ban and drink. Reminds you of that rollicking old song from I.S. Johar’s 1974 spoof, 5 Rifles: Jab se sarkar ne nashabandi tod di, mano ya na mano hum ne peeni chhod di (Now that the government has lifted prohibition, believe it or not we have stopped tippling, because it isn’t such fun any more). This was the funny man’s tribute to Bombay returning to normalcy after Morarji Desai’s Saudi-style prohibition.

Too many things we do in normal life are banned in India. You cannot take pictures at an Indian railway station, forget an airport. The law doesn’t allow an Indian to publish maps of any part of her own country beyond a certain basic level of detail or enlargement.

If you are really keen, you can download them from Google now. It wasn’t impossible even in the pre-Google age. If you were a hiker or an amateur mountaineer, or just a cartographic mad-cap, you could source US Air Force’s open-sales maps. It helped, of course, to have a strategically placed uncle somewhere there. You cannot fly a kite, play with a gas-filled balloon.

I have to be careful saying this, but see how the Honourable Supreme Court is tying itself in knots wanting to clean Indian cricket, which, in fact, is in pretty decent health in terms of both performance and economics. We are second in ODI and T20 rankings, lag in Tests but were at number one for more than a year recently, and will improve when we play a bit more at home, as all teams now do. The same “rotten” BCCI runs the game, has made India the financial and power centre of world cricket. The “rot” that our Supreme Court is cleaning up is not even about match-fixing, but betting and conflicts of interest. The first is an issue only because betting is banned in India, but has been as commonly prevalent as alcohol in Gujarat. It can be easily sorted out by legalising and taxing betting, thereby decriminalising it and setting transparent mechanisms so conflicts can be caught more easily. But who will do this, when the nation so loves to ban?

 

As a fresh India-Australia cricket series gets under way, time to question another distortion in our public discourse, now at the cost of cricket. Being “pushed on the back-foot” is now the most popular cricketing malapropism. Cricket loyalists should be alarmed, particularly as we are likely to wake up early on winter mornings this year-as we did last Tuesday, watching David Warner hit spin and pace over the long, straight boundaries. Off the back-foot. I am not sure when we decided to give the back-foot a bad name. Rajdeep Sardesai, who boasts cricketing pedigree more formidable than most of us, thinks it could be because traditionally Indian batsmen were predominantly front-foot players. A more diabolical explanation could be our old fear of short, rising stuff, which instinctively “pushed” us on the back-foot, if not towards square leg in full retreat.

But much of that has now changed. Some of the most attacking shots were always played off the back-foot, vicious ones like cut, pull, square cut and the hook. Or most delicate ones, leg glance that Ranji apparently invented, late cut, and the gentle nudge off the hip for a single to fine leg that was famously called Ravi Shastri’s chapati shot, but which, in the hands or rather the wrists of V.V.S. Laxman, usually had “4” written on it. In fact, when I asked Sachin to list a shot he would borrow from each one of his batting peers, he wanted from VVS his “thrust off the hip”. In the current Indian line-up you will see Virat Kohli power it past covers off the back-foot, or play the “pulled” drive to midwicket in the old Aussie fashion. And much of the defending to spin is routinely done on the front-foot.

And because the theme of this week’s National Interest is the banning mania, remember the calls to ban the bouncer after Phil Hughes was hit fatally trying to hook, of course off the back-foot! In any case, T-20-ised modern cricket has redefined batting techniques, and rewritten the coaching manuals. Now it’s see ball, hit ball. Not sure, just block, wherever your feet might be. In the brave new world of cricket, where a Sehwag, Warner, de Villiers will even cut off the front-foot and never mind if over point’s head and not all along the ground as the coach wrote, renew your vocabulary. And bury the metaphor of the hapless back-foot.