The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.
Prohibition destoyed the lives of those whom it had intended to protect. The hooch tragedy struck in the heart of Gujarat and snatched away the lives of the poorest and the most deprived. It also brought back into focus the recommendations made by the Inquiry Commissions set up by the previous state governments in the wake of similar tragedies. Most of the legal experts who headed those panels were of the opinion that Gujarat should do away with the Prohibition completely.
Unfortunately, the government seems to have learned no lessons from the past. It continues to uphold and impose an archiac law on the society that has been rejected and discarded by the rest of the world. In the aftermath, the lamentations of the government servants were hollow and without meaning. “Justice will be served,” they claimed. Deceitful words of a diseased and an intellectually bereft babudom.
The women who lost their husbands didn’t lose them to the deadly moonshine, they lost them to poverty and squalor. In a country where the state takes away freedom under the guise of serving justice, poverty is not a totally unexpected consequence. It is a result of a powerful few deciding the fate of the rest of the society.
The behemoth of a beast called the government will continue to eat away at the roots of our society, while we silently suffer in our rational ignorance.
Those women would have preferred their husbands wasted yet alive.
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This post is not a criticism of the honest and hard-working members of the Gujarat administration, but a disapproval of the Indian polity and the constitutional machinery that provides for greater concentrations of power with the Centre and State without actually devolving to the common folk on the streets.
