Up in smoke

No other ban has evoked as strong a reaction as the ban on smoking ordered by the Kerala High Court. Kerala is not new to bans or its vio...

No other ban has evoked as strong a reaction as the ban on smoking ordered by the Kerala High Court. Kerala is not new to bans or its violations and subversions. I can reel off details of the numerous agitations unleashed by women against arrack, from the time of the Vypeen liquor tragedy, liquor deaths that did really register on the insensitive social Richter scale of Kerala. The horror of death by consumption of adulterated liquor is a repeat saga here. Liquor has taken many avatars since then and every one of them is a quot;Kalkiquot;.

Not just the arrack ban but also the ban on pan masala and the ban on begging, not to speak of various other bans which deserve no mention. But the ban on arrack continues to exist in an indefinable, intangible way, much like one8217;s soul exists. It has certainly spawned a multi-faceted ingenuity to supply tipplers with their desired high.

It is in this variegated scenario that the ban on smoking wafts in on a legal whiff. Predictably the ire against it refuses to vanish like thesmoke. There are 52 bars in Kochi and most clients do feel deprived according to a survey. On the other hand, upmarket hotels are not public places in the eye of the law. Ashtrays are as common there as flower vases. quot;No policeman comes to disturb our peace,8221; says a waiter at one such establishment.

Women are often victims of passive smoking, just as they are victims of passive drinking. Of course, since male non-smokers are as much affected, the smoking ban has them singing hallelujah, unlike the ban on arrack. But women are the victims of the alcoholic8217;s mindless unconcern and his cruel response to anything of anyone that obstructs his tryst with Bacchus.

Like the father who pawned his daughter8217;s umbrella to purchase a drink in Moolampally. 8220;When we asked him about it, he beat both of us,8221; a woman who sat on satyagraha demanding a ban on liquor in Moolampally, a picturesque island, told me. Or the woman who was dragged and beaten up by her drunken husband whom she murdered in a numb reaction, pickingup an iron rod to fell him. I know her personally, for I had visited the women8217;s jail. There are dozens of women there sentenced for murder8230; all the mothers who threw their children either into a well or poisoned them and tried to kill themselves. They are murderers, ostracised by family and society, sentenced to a fate worse than capital punishment.

Curiously, it is the women who are out on the streets raising slogans against the high court verdict on smoking. They are beedi workers and the prospect of losing a job in job-starved state is more traumatic than a cancer death. To hell with health and statistics be damned, they argue.

But statistics refuse to go away, especially if they are doled out in digits instead of in percentages. So it is pointed out that the tobacco industry has an annual turnover of Rs 1,200 crore, that it employs 2.1 million people apart from 2.5 lakh retailers in India with a collective income of Rs 60 crore, that the beedi industry alone consumes 215 million kilogrammes oftobacco in India, that it generates Rs 650 crore in excise revenue and Rs 806 crore in foreign exchange.

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Does it reassure anyone that in India one-tenth of smokers smoke an average of 101 cigarettes against the global average of 1,030 cigarettes? Even American President Bill Clinton faced stiff resistance when he took on the tobacco lobby which has now turned Asiawards.

So what is the alternative before activists? Take a card from the book of the politician. Create diversions. Now the only possible diversion is to draw attention to vehicular pollution. No doubt a subject that does deserve urgent attention.