The moral quandary is as deep as the irony is thick. Should India legalise gambling? It’s a question that bobs into public consciousness once in a while, a bothersome irrelevancy, interrupting us at a time when our minds should be more fruitfully employed on weightier questions of geopolitics, social relations and economics. But there we are. Those who blame the commercialisation of cricket and its morphing into a kind of circus may be forgetting something.
The Law Commission has asked whether legalised gambling would be kosher in “Indian circumstances”. Now, that’s a little manufactured innocence. Surely, our epics count among the ideas that made India—this is a country that has seen a central myth hinge on the moral questions that gambling brings forth. But this is no age of Draupadi, wagers don’t lead to exile or war over kingdoms.
Our modern fights are friendly, often fought with a pair of bats and a red ball, with 11 men standing around the field in battle formation. The wagers are over which side will win, which batsman will fall, when, to which bowler. Or even something as innocuous as, say, the number of no-balls. There’s no polyandry for five brothers to put up their wife as a stake.
And there are no kingdoms to be lost. Still, when a game becomes a quasi-religious ritual, with national and regional pride hinging on it, it means old notions like honour are still around, even if in a mock enactment. And that confers on illegal gambling a dirty taint.
In a way, it’s good we preserve some of these notions. The Law Commission’s initiation of a public dialogue, on whether it’s okay for the exchequer to earn some revenue while keeping things above aboard, is not entirely unjustified therefore. Many state governments, on the lookout for extra revenue, once ran lotteries. Gambling thrives in the shadow zones anyway, just a symbiotic step away from criminality. On the other hand, legality may help clean up the netherworld of hawala. Perhaps it’s time to bet on reform.