BJP, spare us the moral policing on drinking age. Learn from AAP
Our politicians may have been better off as crabs because they have the infamous mentality of the crustaceans. Just as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP)-led Delhi government signalled its readiness to consider the reduction of the legal age for drinking to 21 from the irrational 25, the first one to roundly criticise it was the BJP state unit chief Satish Upadhyay. He dramatically predicted that Delhi would “turn alcoholic” if the statement on the legal age for drinking by the Delhi Tourism Minister Kapil Mishra, at no less a forum than the National Restaurant Association of India, were to become the law.
The other congenital publicity hound of the BJP, the party’s national spokesperson Shazia Ilmi, jumped into the fray by reminding the AAP of its ideological lineage and advising it against turning its back on Anna Hazare’s opposition to alcohol. That’s strange, coming as it does from someone who ditched Anna and AAP to latch on to the winning bandwagon!
And Satish Upadhyay? He’s best remembered for making a mockery of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan with a phony photo-op showing him clearing a pile of leaves that had been arranged for him by obliging workers of the civic body he heads. If Delhi can turn “alcoholic” if its government reduces the age for drinking, then the city should have turned morally bankrupt because of that singular act of dishonesty by the man who heads the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC).
Ironically, it was at the NDMC-supported Palate Fest in Nehru Park last year, with Upadhyay’s blessings, that a new precedent was set to allow the sale and consumption of wine and beer at a public space for a food event. As Upadhyay should remember, no single act of alcohol-induced rowdiness or violence was reported from the event.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been hard-selling smart cities. If he really wants smart cities, he must spend some time in India and smarten up his city leaders, who seem to have no idea, for starters, of how the nation eats and drinks.
Delhi, like those states (and they form the majority) where the legal age for drinking is 21, knows how to hold its drinks. It didn’t “turn alcoholic” at the Palate Fest; it won’t “turn alcoholic” if the legal age is reduced. And if the BJP-ruled states of Goa, Haryana and Rajasthan, where the legal drinking age is 18 (!), haven’t turned alcoholic, so wouldn’t Delhi. Upadhyay can breathe easy and start behaving like he belongs to this century!
It’s absurd that we continue to have a law whose roots are in an arcane piece of colonial legislation called the Punjab Excise Act of 1914. It’s a law that challenges the notion of adulthood and treats responsible individuals like idiots, as any colonial administration steeped in Victorian values was expected to do. It’s a law that has no connection with the new Indian reality.
We, unfortunately for the likes of Upadhyay and Ilmi, live in very different times — we earn our right to vote and our driving licence when we are 18, we can marry and have children when we are 21, and if we go by a recent survey commissioned by the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), Indian children today have their first brush with sex by the time they are 14. So, why do we have to wait to turn 25 to exercise our right to imbibe alcohol in a responsible way?