Exuberant youth curbed in
India By Siddharth Srivastava
NEW DELHI - There is a famous line in the
iconic Hindi movie Sholay that translates
as, "In villages all around, mothers tell their
kids to sleep on time at night or the dreaded
dacoit Gabbar Singh will take them away." Today,
in the buzzing city of Mumbai, mothers tell their
children to stay at home and not party out at
night or Assistant Commissioner of Police Vasant
Dhoble could arrest them. Maybe the parents are
happy, in this instance.
Dhoble's team,
with support from the political higher-ups and
those in the police department, has been targeting
youngsters out to have fun at night, hauling them
to the police stations on various charges.
Those imbued in liberal mindsets are upset
and so are the youth, who have now resorted to
street protests, as their supposedly
vibrant night lives have
been reduced to watching TV at home and boring
dinner conversations with mom and dad. Which kid
does that nowadays?
Dhoble, meanwhile,
continues to prowl as the sun goes down. If
government agencies want to, they can dust off
Indian laws that date back more than century to
the colonial British era to harass citizens. Even
breathing could be crime. A couple in a public
place being affectionate toward each other can be
arrested for indecency.
In Mumbai,
individuals supposedly need to procure daily
licenses to be able to drink in a pub. So before
chilling out with friends, one needs to line up at
some stinky place that government offices usually
are and get the clearance, which is never an easy
job given the rude - and always looking for easy
money - officials that man the counters.
The cops ignored this rule for years,
until Dhoble arrived, and this one: If a
restaurant or pub does not have a license, the
patrons drinking there are as much to blame as the
owner of the place offering the service. Who walks
into a pub and asks to see the papers? It defeats
the purpose of going out to forget about the
mundane aspects of existence.
There are
many more archaic laws that persist despite their
obsolescence, including those related to customs
duties. Indians traveling abroad are allowed to
carry back goods worth a small amount without
paying custom duties. However, this is a time when
the overseas shopping standards of the Indian
tourist are among the highest in the world. And if
the customs people are in a bad mood, they can
charge anybody for walking in with a pair of new
shoes and a handbag without declaring them in the
red channel.
The idea of customs is to
protect the Indian economy from unfair
competition. Individual purchases cannot flood the
market. The biggest competition is from cheap
Chinese goods that continue to be illegally
smuggled via the porous borders of Nepal, with the
same customs officials turning a blind eye.
Obviously, they demand their share of goods and
cash.
Yet it is not completely clear why
Mr Dhoble has chosen to attack India's affluent
youth armed with archaic and anachronistic laws
that have earned him the "Taliban" tag. Meanwhile
Mumbai is flush with crime of every other kind
that the police have failed to contain - organized
smuggling, land-grab mafias, prostitution and even
terrorism.
There is a line of thought that
the government people are simply jealous of
private citizens making money legitimately and
having fun. It blunts their inflated egos and
self-important attitudes that hark back to India's
license-permit Raj a couple of decades back when
the government controlled everything.
The
Indian official (or babu) was treated as a demigod
just like the British rulers in pre-independence
India and looked down upon everybody. Economic
liberalization has meant that the hold of babus
has diminished even as a hard-working
high-on-aspiration middle-class India has emerged.
Every now and then, however, the government people
feel the urge to assert themselves. Enter Mr
Dhoble.
There is another line of reasoning
that Dhoble enjoys political backing, as taking on
the rich minority always goes down well with the
many more poor in the country. Indian politicians
like to buttress a Robin Hood image, as poverty is
the biggest vote bank in India. This is a much
easier route to power than the more difficult path
of enabling the impoverished with social security,
health and education to ensure economic and social
mobility.
However, it is also true that
India's partying youth are not exactly setting
standards that inspire. Some of the high-handed
police actions maybe unwarranted, but the fact
remains that having fun in urban centers in India
is increasingly interlinked with extreme
lawlessness that no cultured society can tolerate.
Reports from across the country - Delhi,
Gurgaon, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Goa -
highlight similar aspects: sections of India's
young population out at pubs or parties indulging
in drunken brawls, with car crashes at night,
women molested and raped, rampant alcohol and drug
abuse and more.
Dhoble's actions are
surely driven by complex factors. Parents,
however, will surely not mind having their kids
back at the dinner table for a change.
Siddharth Srivastava is a New
Delhi-based journalist. He can be reached at
sidsri@yahoo.com
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