Opinion: The pub as a sign of freedom

By M H Ahssan

If what happened in Mangalore was disturbing, what is happening in its wake is strange. The first enquiry launched by the National Commission for Women, after making many agitated noises, shifted the blame on to the pub and set about checking its licence, before a new enquiry was launched.

Politicians, from both sides of the aisle, have started making deep rumbling sounds about halting the rise of pub culture. Media has gone into overdrive (forgive the tautology), hyperventilating about freedom and celebrating the woman's right to drink. The pub has become the new battleground for freedom, democracy and Indian values. In a country where there is still one state where no man or woman is allowed to drink at home, far less at a pub, this represents an interesting paradox.

It is clear that what happened in Mangalore was terrible and the perpetrators of the crime must be punished. Our problem is increasingly not that we are becoming more intolerant as a society (a favourite question for TV panel discussions), but that we are becoming more tolerant of symbolic intolerance. We tolerate publicity seeking non-entities too much, giving them way too much leeway in mounting these symbolic assaults on basic freedoms. We are afraid of giving them salutary punishment and end up creating monsters who gradually turn real.

But it is important to put the Mangalore incident in perspective. Here is a fringe group that carries out a one-off symbolic attack, purely to garner attention. It is not indicative of a mass movement, nor is accompanied by a larger attempt to curtail individual freedom. The fact that media cameras were on hand to record what happened, as indeed they always are in events of this kind, gives the intent away. And then, there is the larger question. It is one thing to uphold the principle that every individual has the right to exercise his or her freedom to do whatever is legal, including having a drink at a pub without being questioned, molested or beaten up. Drinking as a sign of freedom is one thing, but to literally promote the cause of drinking is quite another. No one can be prevented from drinking, but that doesn't quite translate into everyone being encouraged to do so. The principle needs vigorous upholding, the practice not necessarily so. Just as banning depiction of smoking on screen can be opposed as a violation of a basic freedom, but that cannot mean we should promote the act of smoking — we cannot confuse the principle with the practice.

From the looks of it, we live in a time when it is important to celebrate things like bar girls, drinking, sexual openness as marks of freedom. The same fervour does not extend to issues like the right to dissent or the right to free information (the RTI is the result of action by committed groups and not any mainstream media action). The idea of freedom seems to gone through an interesting transformation. In popular imagination, it no longer exists as an idea in its capitalized, lofty avatar and is instead pursued as a set of pleasurable activities in our everyday life. Freedom has implicitly become synonymous with the freedom to have fun without hindrances or challenges.

This is understandable for we have grown up in an environment where individualistic pleasure of any kind was circumscribed. We experience freedom most not when we cast a vote, but have a drink. But for the same reason, we should be able to understand why a large part of India will have reservations about pub culture. Forget the hooligans who manipulated the media and focus on the other voices that are coming out asking questions. To dismiss these by labelling them as right wing reactionaries who are coming in the way of India's progress could well be an act of self-deception.

Just as there are people who see drinking as a sign of freedom, there are others who see it as a sign of a life immersed in shallow pleasure-seeking. Pub culture does not refer to the act of drinking in isolation, but to what is seen as the larger world of easy gratification and sensory self-indulgence that builds up around this institution. One may not agree with this characterization, but surely this view should avail of the same freedom that the other one enjoys. And who can challenge the fact that what we called the middle-class Indian way of life till a few years ago, looked upon drinking as an undesirable social evil. It is not unnatural for a large part of India to be uncomfortable with a change that they are neither prepared for nor comfortable with. That doesn't give them a right to beat up people, but surely they have a right to hold that view and pursue all legitimate means of promoting their beliefs.

The fear of change and the indiscriminate love for it are not too far apart in the distortions they can bring. It is all right to ask if we want to be a country where we define our identity through acts of consumption and self-gratification. Freedom comes from being independent-minded, and that means liberation from biases of all kinds and the ability to genuinely appreciate all sides of an argument.