Prohibition is no solution to alcohol addiction, agree the experts. Across the world such a ban has not worked on the ground, leading instead to organised crime, bootlegging and deaths due to adulteration. In India states with prohibition suffer a disproportionate share of hooch fatalities. But politicians remain addicted to it, especially when poll season looms. Both chief minister Nitish Kumar in Bihar and M Karunanidhi seeking to reoccupy Tamil Nadu’s treasury benches are rallying around a policy that replaces a putative evil with a worse reality.

The government’s snipping of 857 porn sites, in the name of enforcing the Supreme Court’s observations on blocking child porn, is another instance of avoidable over-regulation. The apex court had rightly called for spiking child porn, but blocking all porn as well as adult websites is not a feasible task. Neither is it necessary. As the Supreme Court also observed, an adult can watch porn in privacy. It’s high time for the state to stop infantilising its citizens.

Demands for banning books, films, foods keep growing because political expediency feeds them. There’s the recent beef ban in Maharashtra and Haryana that defies economics and gets in the way of what citizens can eat. It’s cost livelihoods and opened a Pandora’s Box – now there are demands for a ban on the highly profitable export of buffalo meat. Like Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, the beef ban targets and harasses minorities in particular. Poor people commonly trade in cattle, but now this has come under the scrutiny of a licence raj. Enforcing the beef ban also has great potential to ratchet up tensions among communities that currently coexist.

Bihar’s chief minister said last month that he will impose a liquor ban if he retains power after coming assembly elections. That begs the question why he doesn’t deliver it right away if it’s so desirable. It’s been pointed out how liquor licences have multiplied during his long rule – because of the welcome monies they add to state coffers. The vital point is that Bihar has experimented with prohibition in the past but found it un-implementable, unfruitful and unaffordable. Prohibition is only one aspect of a growing ban mentality. Prohibitory laws are economically and socially counterproductive. They only perpetuate a feudal mai-baap sarkar that offers bogus morality in place of genuine security. What modern India must encourage instead is people’s freedom to decide how they eat, drink, think and live.