Opinion Gutka Wars
When documents hide more than they reveal
Lies,lies,lies! was the reverberating leitmotif of Sagarika Ghoshs Face the Nation on Wednesday night. With tonal variations like: Why is he lying? He cannot lie! And the threatening counterpoint: I will show you,Sagarika! I have documents! The man making this surreal music who should have been facing it instead must have hired a truck to get his mountain of paper to the studio. He produced documents for everything. Bet he could even have produced your credit card record and horoscope. Maybe mine,too.
But mostly,Sanjay Bechan,Executive Director of the Smokeless Tobacco Federation of India,was bursting with data about gutka and cigarettes. He needed the security blanket,facing an issue which has been smouldering since 2003,when the government joined battle with Big Tobacco by banning sales to minors. IBNLives Face the Nation focused on the latest skirmish in this extended conflict,which is over gutka. Madhya Pradesh,Kerala,Bihar,Rajasthan and Goa banned the sale of gutka earlier this year. Now,Maharashtra has banned it along with pan masala,and Himachal Pradesh is expected to follow suit.
The battle against tobacco is desperately important in India,which faces a public health disaster. But the opening questions of this programme,pegged on the news that a village in Noida had imposed fines for selling and consuming gutka,were the least important: would banning gutka promote a black market and clandestine imports from permissive states,and is gutka being unfairly demonised to favour the cigarette industry?
Four-fifths of the guests were pro-ban – Amal Pushp,director of the National Tobacco Control Programme,Dr Srinath Reddy,president of the Public Health Foundation of India,Madhya Pradesh Food Commissioner Ashwini Kumar and Naveen Khanna,who suffers from oral cancer induced by gutka. The other fifth,Bechan,gave no quarter,waving his documents in everyones face like flimsy battle standards. It was only halfway into the programme that the rest lost their patience and said it like it is.
Actually,the law banning gutka is pan-Indian. If it were enforced by all states,there would be no black market because gutka would cease to exist. And gutka is not being unfairly targeted to distract attention from cigarettes,which have been in the crosshairs since 1975. Gutka has been hit first because its use is growing faster than that of cigarettes. It is used by new converts who cannot afford to smoke or cannot afford to be seen smoking. And it is easier to hit than cigarettes,being susceptible to laws which prohibit the use of tobacco in food. Helpfully,the courts have ruled that gutka is a food since it is ingested.
If they are to survive their clientele,gutka manufacturers need a more sophisticated advocate than the cheap-shooting Bechan. And Ghoshs show needed a real advocate. An ambulance-chasing one. Globally,tobacco companies have been curbed not only by lawmaking but by lawsuits filed by victims. The industry has lost hundreds of billions since the first cases were filed in the 1950s. It now faces six massive class action suits in Canada and Australia. I look forward to the day when Indian victims find public interest groups to sue on their behalf and make the meretricious arguments of the industrys Bechans redundant.
By now,you probably imagine that Im part of the new wellness Taliban. Not so. I began my ongoing affair with nicotine at the age of 14. But the impact of tobacco on public health is so obvious that even a user should have the sense to reject the sophistry of the industrys lobbyists and their mountains of paper.
pratik.kanjilal@expressindia.com
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