01 November,2021 07:13 AM IST | Mumbai | Ajaz Ashraf
The travails of Aryan and his friends will now make anyone lighting up a reefer look out for killjoys in uniform. File pic
There cannot be another person as culturally rooted as former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav. In his autobiography, Lalu reminisces about his days as president of the Patna University Students Union. A rival group comprising Sushil Kumar Modi and Ravi Shankar Prasad, both BJP leaders today, complained to Jayaprakash Narayan, who had by 1974 galvanised students to protest against Indira Gandhi, that Lalu drank liquor.
JP summoned Lalu, who confessed, "I drink toddy at times because I am from a village background where toddy-drinking is common." Nervous, Lalu says he ratted on Shivanand Tiwari, currently in Rashtriya Janata Dal, who was known to smoke ganja. JP smiled and advised Lalu to quit drinking as he was emerging as a role model for students.
Smoking pot was and is a rite of passage for college students, even though possession and consumption of narcotics became illegal in 1985, when the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act was enacted. Since Aryan's friends were caught allegedly possessing narcotics, they must be punished, Hindutva supporters insist.
But the Act was designed to punish drug traffickers, not consumers. Section 64A, for instance, says a person possessing a small amount of grass or hashish - up to 1,000 grams of the former and up to 100 grams of the latter - will be shielded from prosecution in case he or she volunteers to undergo de-addiction. This is why the police, until the crackdown on Bollywood, preferred to extract money from those caught with a small amount of cannabis, rather than booking them.
The travails of Aryan and his friends will now make anyone lighting up a reefer look out for killjoys in uniform. And, at the same time, still smoke weed to show his or her contempt for a paternalistic state caught in a time warp.
This was precisely the response of women who flooded social media with their photos in ripped jeans after former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Tirath Singh Rawat criticised the sartorial style. In 2019, a backlash in the Rajya Sabha prompted BJP MP DP Vats to withdraw his suggestion of revising the rule requiring women in uniformed services to wear the "shirt tucked in under the belt and pants."
In 2016, Gyan Dev Ahuja, a BJP MLA from Rajasthan, said Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University staff finds 3,000 used condoms daily. "The misdeeds they commit with our sisters and daughters there," he lamented, displaying his disapproval of premarital sex. Ahuja was denied a BJP ticket in the 2018 Rajasthan Assembly elections.
But BJP MP Tejasvi Surya's career has flourished despite tweets such as this: "95% Arab women have never had an orgasm in the last few hundred years! Every mother has produced kids as an act of sex and not of love." The worst of killjoys is the prurient one who harbours fantasies of hate.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh boss Mohan Bhagwat recently said, "How do Hindu girls and boys adopt other religions for petty selfishness, for marriage?" Bhagwat is oblivious of the sociological term "conversion of convenience", which enables interfaith couples to appease their killjoy parents insistent upon placing religion over love.
No wonder, last year's Tanishq advertisement depicting an inter-faith couple happy in a Muslim family had to be withdrawn because Hindutva footsoldiers thought it promoted love jihad. The makers of a recent ad showing a same-sex couple celebrating Karwa Chauth were perhaps too stoned to remember that literalism has become a national bug.
Chief Minister Adityanath's obsession with vegetarianism recently had him ban the sale of liquor and meat in 10 sq km area in Mathura-Vrindavan, now declared a pilgrimage site. He has replicated the ban on non-vegetarian food imposed in Haridwar and Rishikesh in Uttarakhand, through a 1956 government notification. In 2004, the Supreme Court also upheld the ban on eggs in the two towns.
Yet meat could be sourced from outside Haridwar town. In March, the ban was extended to the entire district of Haridwar and slaughterhouses were shut down. This order was challenged in the Uttarakhand High Court, which, in July, cited surveys to show that 72 per cent of Uttarakhand's population and 70 per cent of Indians were non-vegetarian. The court said the ban was a matter concerning the fundamental rights of citizens, not just Muslims: "The question is whether a citizen has the right to decide his own diet or whether that will be decided by the state."
Indeed, for humans, to choose is to be. Forever lecturing people on how they should live and enjoy, the BJP has become the Bharatiya Killjoy Party. Diwali Mubarak. Apologies! Diwali Ki Shubhkamnayen to you, enjoy until killjoys waylay you. And, please, use WhatsApp judiciously.
The writer is a senior journalist. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.
