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Gluttons For Partial Narratives On Punjab’s Ailments?

by MALLIKA KAUR

 

 

FACEBOOK POST:  Hi, since you might not read beyond a few sentences, here's what this piece delves on: We need to start questioning videos like ‘Glut' that have been recently hailed for bringing to light drug addiction in Punjab, without providing the overall context for the alarming statistics. It is no longer enough for us to consume, that too with gratitude, material that highlights disease in Punjab. It is time to demand analysis, fair assessment, and agendas that propel change rather than promote a sense of the impotent Punjabi. As important as it is for Punjabis to be shown the mirror, and to be thankful to those showing the mirror, the mirror must not be smudged and tainted, distorting the full picture.

Let's start with something more than taking a whipping with a ‘Thank you, may I please have more?' A simple ‘Bell Bajao' campaign, calling out those we love so they don't join the statistic, is suggested at the bottom of this piece; see you there?

 

"How could you have not watched it yet?" Manpreet asked me incredulously. My brother was talking about the recent Facebook hit: "Glut - The Untold Story of Punjab."

A non-commercial student venture, the film isn't about big fat Punjabi weddings, unending dowries, multiple SUVs, or unmindful capitalist consumption promoting unsustainable ‘development.' It's about the ‘glut' of drugs in Punjab - "73.5% of Punjab's youth is addicted to drugs," it alarms us.

Social networking promotes group think and I hadn't missed the many ‘Likes' on my Facebook friends' walls (Facebook webpages, for the uninitiated); the video was uploaded and re-loaded on wall after wall. I found myself recommending it to a friend or two to "check out" even before I finally had the patience for the entire high-resolution video to download on my computer.

Manpreet had warned me there were "some things that make you cringe." But he had not warned me enough.

In contextualizing the saga of drugs and death in Punjab, the video goes back a curious 4 years only: "Today, in the last 4 years, this state is in jeopardy like it's never been before." In sensitizing the audience, or even itself, to drug addiction, the video makes negligible effort, right from the onset: "and we are not talking about a disease, but the drug menace in Punjab." I thought back to the Facebook endorsements and watched on.

And then there it was - "Punjab living in a bubble, and it's about to burst ... its living in an excess about everything."

The thesis of the ‘glut' video. Articulated by Vijay Simha, the Tehelka journalist who wrote the also widely read article "The Poverty of Plenty" on October 2, 2010. The gist of that article was that Punjabis, used to ‘doing everything big,' were now going at drugs like bees to honey. Both this article and the ‘Glut' video talk about the symptoms of the problem in today's Punjab, but the problem itself mostly remains concealed.

And a sexy concealment at that.

The video shows the packages of drugs being thrown across the Punjab border, the mules receiving these packages in dim light, and waiting for the call from their handler on a pre-paid cross-border telephone, and the giddily efficient transit of the drugs to New Delhi. If high quality video and sound enrapture, pointed commentary hammers in the take-home points: "don't have to bring terrorism back here ... more effective than that is these drugs ... Pakistan is now not killing us with guns, but with drugs."

Concealed however are the basic policy problems that hurt Punjab from within: unaddressed Center-State relations, involving the problems of water diversion, stagnant Minimum Support Prices (MSPs) for crops, and lack of industrialization on the pretext that this is a border state. The Punjabi farmer who is reaping much less than what he sows is not in "a bubble."

The family of a farmer who commits suicide due to debt-estimates for the number of suicides vary from 50,000 to 90,000 as per civil society and even the government appointed Punjab Farmers Commission estimated 2000 suicides a year-isn't suffering from living "in excess."

Moreover, alcohol and drugs are as much part of the economy and politics - perhaps the videos own referral, at least twice, to the drug epidemic being "four years" old, gives insight to that - as is the cultural acceptability of "peg-sheg" at sundown.

But I refused to write all this out the first time I finished watching the video. There was all the flutter about it on Facebook, you see. And then there were the legitimate points the video raised: the extent of the drug problem (even if the figures are one-half of what the video states, the problem is extensive; even one-forth rather than "three-forth" of the youth being addicted signals that the alarm bells have been ignored); the fraudulence and even violence of many de-addiction centers; the heart-wrenching agony of families whose children die of their addictions.

A Colonel G.S. Sandhu even recognized that the lack of education and industry combines and leads to drug addiction. I figured, like Manpreet said, "at least they are making people think about the problem."

But then I indulged in some easy eavesdropping. En route to Delhi, I tried to sleep as three men in the seats in front of me, caffeinated on their carry-out coffees, probably cappuccinos (let me project my cravings on them), were animatedly discussing cricket, recent Tweets, old classmates, and then, "You really haven't seen that yet ... it's called Glut?" I sat up a little.

A duet followed for the sole friend who hadn't seen the video. "Look basically, it's like in movies, the Pakis throw across a package, these guys here, the underground and overground gangs are super-organized, even have cell phones. So once the package is on this side of the border, they take the stuff to sell to rich kids in Delhi, and many other kids on the way. And these kids are all loaded with cash and snorting all of this happily."

I strained and strained to hear any other points they had taken from the film. Any questions it had invoked, any analysis it had stimulated, any call to action it had birthed. But nothing. It was just like the movies.

If the film restricted itself to showing just the journey of drugs across the borders, or to tracing the effect of drugs on families and loved ones, or even to humanizing the statistics about extensive drug addiction, further critique could be held back. But the film, from its very title, has a thesis about Punjab. With the tone of telling the whole truth, it pushes down a narrative that is not only incomplete but disrespectful and counter-productive.

Drug addicts are not treated as patients, but rather as those leeching on our society. And then we wonder why our de-addiction drives and centers are so ineffective? Drugs themselves are treated as something that is only brought to Punjabis due to a dirty across-border conspiracy. And then we wonder why even on repeated evidence about drugs being part of political campaigns and canvassing, nothing is done to stop the infestation?

With all earnestness, towards the close of the film, Rahul Bose asks whether "Punjab will be able to bounce back from this ... like it did in 70s with Green revolution or the 80s from the militancy?"

Perhaps it was too much to ask for the film to explore the links that researchers have made between the Green Revolution and militancy; how agrarian unrest grew from economic concerns, was fuelled by discrimination, and given the label of religious intolerance. But asking for a Clean Revolution while putting the Green Revolution on a pedestal is really quite fantastic.

Punjab is facing a high rate of farmer suicides, of water poisoned with heavy metals, and cancer rates that are co-related with pollutants in our soil-Punjab is still paying for the ‘Green Revolution,' an experiment promoted by the U.S. government and organizations like the World Bank, and accepted and executed by the Indian government. With its British-era colonial canals and hard-working majority agrarian population, Punjab became the ideal candidate for foreign seeds that did not work without the expensive fertilizers and increased quantities of water, but did make this wheat-eating state the majority wheat and rice producer for the entire country.

Now, when the soil and water are depleted, agriculture is not a profitable enterprise (which it ceased becoming in the 1980s itself, contrary to popular Green Revolution platitudes). Moreover, alternatives to agriculture are few and far between, since industrialization in Punjab has been stalled allegedly because it is a border state (never mind that the border state of Gujarat has become the poster child for industrial investment). As a result, there is a high level of despair in the state. Not that drugs are the answer to this despair, but they find easy targets in this despair.

In the film, drugs and alcohol have been treated as something Punjabis merrily consume, hastening their death, with abandon, without questioning what the drugs feed on or then who else but the end users benefit from the high consumption.

In a fairly contextualized piece, "Indian women lead fight for prohibition in villages," which featured in The Guardian on February 27, 2011, Jason Burke also highlights how alcohol, a common gateway to other intoxicants, is a serious problem in Punjab. He also states alarming statistics: government statistics reveal that the 25 million strong population drank an average of 10 bottles of spirits each in 2010.

But Burke highlights how the change-makers, the social activists, the revolutionaries are also alive and kicking in the same state - not everyone is in a haze after all. He writes about local women who are campaigning to shut down liquor shops, and sarpanchs and others who are helping this cause. Then, Burke makes a crucial observation.

"The number of liquor shops has gone from less than 5,000 a decade ago to nearly 7,000 today. A bottle of heavily taxed local spirits costs between 100 rupees (£1.30) and 250 rupees. Their sale provides a huge source of revenue for the cash-strapped government."

He also explains how local bureaucrats have in fact resisted attempts at shutting down liquor shops, by employing helpful legal loopholes. And, ironically, officials also cite "smuggling" as the reason for resisting the grassroots movement against liquor shops: "[O]fficials dug up a sub-clause allowing them to keep them open if there was evidence of smuggling or illegal distillation nearby."

It is no longer enough for us to consume, that too with gratitude, material that highlights disease in Punjab. It is time to demand analysis, fair assessment, and agendas that propel change rather than promote a sense of the impotent Punjabi. As important as it is for Punjabis to be shown the mirror, and to be thankful to those showing the mirror, the mirror must not be smudged and tainted, distorting the full picture. Societal condemnation of drug peddlers, carriers, dealers, and the forces around them that are complicit and profiting from the entire business is necessary. But a condemnation of the entire society will prevent change and only re-enforce the sense of helplessness and disempowerment.

Let's start with something more than taking a whipping with a ‘thank you, may I please have more?'

A simple campaign by the group Breakthrough, "Bell Bajao," encouraged everyone to speak up when they knew of cases of domestic violence-in their homes, neighborhoods, communities. Similarly, can we not start a simple campaign to call addiction ‘addiction'; to check our fathers, sisters, brothers, friends when they insist they just like a ‘buzz' to pass out into restful sleep every night; to respect those whose religious convictions prohibit intoxicants without a "O, come on, I won't tell anyone"; to help our students resist the mantra "try everything once, yaa?"; and finally, to stop saying, "Of course I drink, I am a Punjabi!"

There is so much more we can do beyond caricaturing ourselves or accepting others doing the same.

 

The author holds a Master in Public Policy from JFK School of Government, Harvard and a J.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Law. Her perspectives have been informed by growing up in Punjab and having worked on gender and minority rights issues in South Asia as well as the U.S. since 2001.

 

 

[Courtesy: CounterCurrents.org]

April 24, 2011

Conversation about this article

1: Brijinder Singh (New York, U.S.A.), April 24, 2011, 11:03 AM.

The Indian government has refused to diversify Punjab's economy, which is primarily agricultural. The growing IT sector has created jobs across the country, except for Punjab. In other countries, farmers are subsidized to rotate crops. In India, the government has refused to give such subsidies. The farmer is then forced to use every square inch of his land to grow rice, which depletes the soil and ground water. Farmers have been forced to grow rice because of the small margins placed by the Indian government on other crops. Rice requires a large amount of water to grow, but water is scarce. Punjab is not allowed to develop industry to reduce pressure on its agriculture. Therefore new graduates cannot find jobs. Destitute farmers and unemployed young men blindly turn to drugs and alcohol to ease their misery.

2: Taran Singh (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), April 24, 2011, 4:13 PM.

I agree with Mallika. I think each one of us can start by working on our own loved ones, in getting them away from drugs and alcohol. This is practical, and doesn't require an organization or funds. Nevertheless, it will take a lot of time, courage, commitment, dedication, perseverance and heart-break ... but it is bound to give great results. And it will matter a great deal in the context of the greater picture.

3: Harbans Lal (Arlington, Texas, U.S.A.), April 26, 2011, 11:14 PM.

Very well written; a clear warning! Let it raise the consciousness of our leadership at all levels so that they can succeed in eradicating the evil of drug abuse. Drug abuse is a kurehat for every Sikh, so commanded our Guru.

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