Tea Anyone?

While recently at one of Karachi’s most prestigious restaurants; where a piece of meat will be garnished with a few herbs, given a difficult to pronounce name and charged to you for a small fortune, I noticed an interesting sight I had not yet been exposed to. A bunch of stylish ‘twenty something’s’ strutted in, designer sunglasses gleaming seven days a week at the gym bodies bulging, and handed the waiter a large brown paper bag. I thought little of this until he approached their table with a kettle and a couple of cups. I was perplexed at the idea of tea at that hour of the night until I viewed the texture of this liquid I realized this my friends, was no Lipton, it was red wine.

This phenomenon, that from the contraband handling waiters swiftness to understand what was required of him must happen quite often got me thinking about the general position of alcohol as ‘illegal’ in our country and the fact that a crime punishable by 30 lashes is so openly committed. The current position of alcohol being illegal for all muslims but not so for religious minorities who may purchase it from specific shops. However these shops are in a far greater number than is necessary to supply for religious minorities truth, and shopkeepers don’t even bother putting up the façade of not selling to muslims and law enforcement makes no real attempt to stop them from doing so. It is also important to note that this is not another instance of the establishment turning a blind eye to the actions of the elite but consumption of alcohol is widely practiced by the working class too. The class composition of the victims of a tragic incident of a poisoned batch of liquor going around earlier this year showed this.

Fact is the consumption of alcohol was never truly reduced with prohibition and the idea that our police force could handle it when the Americans were unable to do so in the ‘20s is rather absurd. So if this is not reducing any of the social evils of the consumption of alcohol why not put an end to the hypocrisy and completely legalise and tax it, this will also remove bootlegger dealers who often also deal in harder narcotics that are much more dangerous and addictive. Fear of the reaction of the religous right is the main reason for lack of such action. Prohibation was itself a move pushed in by religious groups exerting pressure on the Bhutto government in ’79, these policies were carried on in Zias “Islamisation” that fit so well with his image as a pious man helping those sweet massive fund giving Americans to defeat those ‘Kafir’ Soviets. Truth being Zia probably didn’t see any real point in prohibition himself, infact according to one of Bhuttos last letters he was himself a brandy man, but the supposed implementation of Islamic law was of pivotal importance to his image and despotic hold of power as he worked to establish allegiance to Islam with support for his implementation of Wahabia Sharia laws that set up an authoritarian state for him.

This remains true for today’s religious parties, in fact the countries biggest distillery Murre Brewery is in the MMA controlled NWFP, surely they realize production is going beyond the needs of the countries religious minorities? What they truly aim to do is establish and keep people in the constant chase of folk devils in society that they claim are responsible for many of society’s social problems and thus drawing peoples attention away from deeper often structural causes of these issues and the failings of their own governments. This is of great help in preventing demands for any meaningful social change in society. The same, to some extent, holds true for religious parties in all parts of the world. This can be illustrated by the case in Sudan in which British school teacher Gillian Gibbons was charged for blasphemy for naming a teddy bear in her class Mohammad, this was followed up by a hype of protest in the country that were incited by government officials and Imams linked with the authoritarian Islamic government of President Bashir. Just as the Bashir government attempted to divert peoples attention from his authoritarian policies and real problems affecting peoples lives our local religious groups hope to divert attention from real issues while they take power away from the people and establish theocratic police states.

Whether its evil school teachers trying to undermine religion with teddy bear names, same sex couples, evil foreigners attempting to poison our children with polio shots or a glass of wine these not the real issues.

Well maybe I'm getting a bit too worked up and I should just calm down and break out my kettle, sadly mine only contains tea. sigh!