The lovely tale of Liquor
during Lockdown and before
At every stage, addiction is driven by one of the most powerful, mysterious, and
vital forces of human existence. What drives addiction is longing —
a longing not just of brain, belly, or loins but finally of the heart.
Cornelius Platinga
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The use of alcohol in India for drinking purposes dates back to somewhere between 3000 and 2000 BC. An alcoholic beverage called Sura which was distilled from the rice was popular at that time in India for common men to unwind at the end of a stressful day. . Yet the first mention of Alcohol appears in Rig Veda (1700BC). It mentions intoxicants like soma and prahamana. Although the soma plant might not exist today, it was famous for delivering a euphoric high. It was also recorded in the Samhita, the medical compendium of Sushruta that he who drinks soma will not age and will be impervious to fire, poison, or weapon attack. The sweet juice of Soma was also said to help establish a connection with the gods. Such was the popularity of alcohol. Initially used for medicinal purposes, with time it evolved and became the beverage that brought life to social gatherings, and eventually consuming alcohol has become a habit for many.
With such a rich history of not just humans but also of the gods,
what is a worldwide pandemic to stop anybody from drinking?
. . .
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According to a report released by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in 2018, an average Indian drinks approximately 5.7 liters of alcohol every year. In a population of casual and excessive drinkers, with the shutters of liquor stores down, it must have been extremely difficult for “certain” people to survive lockdown. In the first two phases of lockdown, the desperation had quadrupled prices of alcohol in the Grey Market of India. Also, According to Google Trends, online searches for “how to make alcohol at home” peaked in India during the fourth week of March, which was the same when the lockdown was announced. As a consequence, a few people died drinking home-brewed liquor. People committed suicide due to alcohol withdrawal syndrome. Owing to the worsening situation and to reboot the economy, some states decided to open licensed liquor stores in the third phase of the COVID-19 Pandemic lockdown in India. This decision was the worst best decision the state governments could take. The kilometer-long queues in front of liquor stores were evidence that a pandemic can turn your life upside down yet your relationship with alcohol cannot move an inch.
The love in the hearts of those who are addicted was explicit. We might have seen addiction, we might have witnessed desperation but what happened in the month of May was madness, not just in terms of the way people pounced but also in the way the government earned. According to a report by Hindustan Times, on the first day of the third phase of Lockdown, the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh recorded a sale of over Rs 100 Crore from liquor. On the second day of the reopening of Liquor stores, Karnataka reported sales of 197 crores in a single day which was the largest ever. Eventually, the prices of Liquor were hiked to 100% to discourage people from drinking.
. . .
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There was a special corona fee that was imposed in Delhi by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. A 70% corona fee was imposed in Delhi, yet the sales did not drop. The entire situation was a disaster for the law enforcement officers, social distancing was easily abandoned and a basic code of conduct was happily violated. Despite the chaos created, the states continued to collect revenues. Home delivery of alcohol was allowed in Maharashtra and e-tokens were sold in Delhi.
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Demand for liquor is inelastic which means that
the sale of alcohol is not much responsive to change in prices.
In general, since alcohol policy is a state subject in India, revenue from Liquor is a cash cow for state governments. In 2018 and 2019, four states collectively collected about 20,000 crores in taxes from the sale of liquor. As much as the state earns from the sale of Liquor it is undoubtedly, a threat to the Economy. Consumption of alcohol has dire health consequences. When a person consumes an alcoholic beverage, there is a rise in BAC because of which there is a gradual and progressive loss of driving ability because of an increase in reaction time, overconfidence, degraded muscle coordination, impaired concentration, and decreased auditory and visual acuity. This is known as drunken driving. (V. M. Anantha Eashwar, 2020) Drunken driving is the third biggest cause of road accidents and over speeding in India. Road accidents are not it; alcoholism causes sleep problems, heart, and liver issues. Also, it is not about an individual’s life, it ruins the lives of all people concerned.
Addiction also causes economic loss. In 2000, Vivek Benegal and his team assessed 113 patients admitted to a special de-addiction service for alcohol dependence. They found that
the average individual earned a mean of ₹1,661 but
spent ₹1,938 per month on alcohol, incurring high debt.
They also found that 95% did not work for about 14 days in a month. They concluded that it led to a loss of ₹13,823 per person per year in terms of foregone productivity. A more recent study, Health Impact and Economic Burden of Alcohol Consumption in India, led by Gaurav Jyani, concluded that alcohol-attributable deaths would lead to a loss of 258 million life-years between 2011 and 2050. The study placed the economic burden on the health system at $48.11 billion, and the societal burden (including health costs, productivity loss, and so on) at $1,867 billion. “This amounts to an average loss of 1.45% of the gross domestic product (GDP) per year to the Indian economy,” the study said. (Mint, 2020)
Setho ka Gaon
With each passing day, the ‘curtain of separation’ weighs down on the women of Afghanistan, paving the way for tyranny to thrive.
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ECOLOGICAL FEMINISM
Devanshi Sharma
Resources, their availability, management and for quite some time their depletion has been a focal point of concern all over the world. This is not much of a surprise given that they are of central importance to both the public and private sector for purposes as diagonally opposed as social welfare and profit maximisation.
Society has been concerned with this issue of resource utilization for a long time. It is the advent of capitalism around the 17th c, and the way society has progressed since then to arrive at the various new techniques of tapping resources that have been crucial in giving rise to a scenario and a worldview that is based on socioeconomic and structural patterns of domination, one that is causing environmental degradation. Not much of a surprise that environmentalism became a key point of discussion and the world saw many such movements as the WTO protests in 1999 and the events of September 2001.
Ecofeminism or ecological feminism largely agreed to this view and recognised the structural patterns of domination except that it went beyond it to say that these are the same channels that lead to oppression of women i.e., it is the same worldview that causes inequality and injustice to women , that causes environmental degradation. Therefore gender became a key point of analysis for the relationship between humans and the natural world.
The term “Ecofeminism” was coined by Francoise D’Eaubonne in 1980 and gained popularity in protests against ecological damage in the world. The term highlighted how both nature and women fell prey to the patriarchal mindset that considers both of them as an object to be owned, used and dominated. It, therefore, drew parallels between the two and believed that the feminist movement and environmentalism are interconnected, due to the strong relationship between women and earth.
There is, however, a very specific way in which ecofeminism differs from other theories of feminism, an issue that is taken up at intervals in this article.
Looking at the interconnectedness of the two movements has been a focal point of study for Vandana Shiva, an eco feminist, author and activist who has through her writings tried to explain the extent to which globalisation has impacted human lives.
Herself part of the Chipko movement that involved women in rural India hugging trees to prevent industrial logging , the movement was a great success in convincing Indira Gandhi, India’s prime minister in 1981, to declare a fifteen-year moratorium on logging in Himalayan forests in Uttar Pradesh. Vandana Shiva calls her ecofeminist theory as “subsistence “differentiating it from the other theories of feminism that talk about the hierarchical dichotomy in the western world. Her theory on the other hand, has a clear focus on the third world women whose lives were adversely affected by the corporate world and the spread of globalisation, a clear example being the chipko movement. A feminist theory of ecology in general does not aim to establish a dominant group but aims for a society with respect for women and nature and equality for all.
In her 1993 book Ecofeminism, Shiva and Mies state, “Rather than attempting to overcome this hierarchical dichotomy many women have simply up-ended it, and thus women are seen as superior to men, nature to culture, and so on”.
Shiva and Maria Mies point out that the damage that is caused to the earth by the corporate sector are feminist concerns too because in both these cases the enemy seems to be same, the masculinist mentality that wants to control on one hand women’s independence, their right to their own sexuality while on the other hand wants to dominate and control land and resource much in the same way by using systems as capitalism and state power and therefore in her own view it is impossible to achieve liberation for women without simultaneously struggling for liberation of all life from the” dominant patriarchal/capitalist worldview.”
A certain historical context gave rise to her Ecofeminism which was the green revolution and the globalisation of 20th c and the model of development which she calls as maldevelopment.
For instance, when WTO aggressively imposed monoculture farming on Indian farmers in the 1980s, there were mass suicides after their crops failed. Shiva argues that women in the global agrarian south are closer to nature and therefore, when a closed cycle of subsistence farming and consumption is broken by monoculture farming, it is women and girls who suffer first.
While it is true and certain criticisms were raised against her ideas as promoting “gendered feminism” wherein women are involved in subsistence work and are the safeguards of natural resources with their nurturing nature. However, we need to realise the context in which the marginalisation of women and nature is considered here.
The world has definitely moved since that time, and women are involved in broad areas of life now, perhaps the reason why all the major theories of feminism haven’t lost momentum while the Ecofeminism movement lost it way back. However, when posed with the question of whether it is relevant in today’s world in any form or are there any takeaways, the picture is a little more complicated.
What one needs to understand is that perhaps the traditional roles are still preserved in indigenous communities, in that when capitalism invades their livelihood, it is women and girls who are sustaining their families who take the first blow. A case in point could be the Narmada Bachao Andolan, which is fairly recent. One needs to realise that when farmers commit suicide in India, due to failed crop which in many instances are attributed to the usage of genetically modified seed, it is women who are very much holding the family structure together who are left clueless.
Perhaps the way in which Vandana Shiva generalises the intrinsic nature of women and labels it is problematic; however, her analysis of the patriarchal capitalist world is a point that perhaps does hold validity. Furthermore, one needs to understand that the ecological movement is very much in place with the world society being faced with climate change and environmental degradation. In that sense, Ecofeminism can hold relevance for those women who are opposing the capitalist order to protect their livelihood and their source of subsistence as Vandana shiva pointed back then.