Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday on Oct 2nd is observed as a public holiday in India. You could celebrate the day by raising a glass or two. Or you could just remember that Gandhi was not in favor of alcohol and voluntarily decide to abstain from alcohol. But if you want to have a drink all the same, you would be out of luck unless you have some sitting at home or in the comfort of a five-star hotel room. All liquor shops are closed and restaurants will not serve you alcohol.

In India, the government mandates certain days as “dry days” and disallows the sale of alcohol even in states where alcohol is legal, sort of like a “temporary-micro-prohibition.” For example, on the first day of the month—payday—liquor shops are closed in some states. I also found that sale and serving of alcohol is prohibited on some specific festival days, such as the final day of Ganesh festival.

Clearly the micro-prohibitions affect the poor unwashed masses, because the rich can always stock up on booze anytime they like. I suspect that they are also aimed at the poor and unwashed. It is part of that grand paternalistic vision that can be traced back to a feudal mindset of the ruling classes going back centuries but which was since independence promoted by the new political bosses, the ersatz British. The real British denied political freedom to Indians; the ersatz British denied economic freedom.

Banning the sale and serving of alcohol on certain days clearly indicates that the policy makers don’t trust the people to know what to do when. The people are like children who cannot be allowed the freedom to decide for themselves whether to drink or not to drink. Actually, if one closely looks at it, one sees the “can’t trust the people” attitude of the rulers pretty prevalent. Whenever the government prohibits some activity which is clearly not harmful and has no negative externalities, it is stating that the people cannot be trusted to know what is good for them.

What puzzles me is that the same unwashed masses who cannot be trusted to know whether to have a drink or not, who cannot be trusted to exercise judgment in many economic activities, these same people are trusted to figure out who should be elected to be the policy makers and rulers. If the people are so dumb as to not know what is good for them in a simple matter of a drink, can you really trust them with a vote?

Indian democracy, as I have argued before here, is a cargo-cult democracy (see here, and here.) Did you know that Ram Vilas Paswan used a Osama Bin Laden look-alike to woo Muslim voters? And that this fake OBL changed sides and is now with Laloo Prasad Yadav. That an OBL look-alike is a poster boy for two competing political parties in Bihar is a disturbing sign. It implies that the poster boy appeals to the Muslims voters, and that the Muslim voters consider OBL a hero. The same OBL who clubs India among the countries that need to be destroyed as the enemies of the one true god. So it comes down to the tacit admission on the part of these political parties that their Muslim voters have allegiances to parties and people who have India’s destruction as part of their agenda and therefore the Muslims are traitors. Should not both Paswan and Yadav be charged with sedition?

{Followup post: The government as big daddy.}