Mumbai: Another BJP lawmaker Ram Prasad Sarmah joined the bandwagon backing his party colleagues that smoking does not have ‘ill effects’ on health.
Sarmah pointed out that there is no proof that smoking causes cancer. “There is no proof that smoking causes cancer,” Ram Prasad Sarmah said.
The BJP parliamentarian from Assam told an English news channel, “I know two elderly people who drank a bottle of alcohol and smoked 60 cigarettes every day. One is still alive, the other died at 86.”
Sarmah, 60, has become the third parliamentarian from the ruling BJP to side with the tobacco industry. On Thursday, BJP leader and beedi-baron Shyam Charan Gupta backed MP Dilip Gandhi’s comment, asking, “Why can’t doctors explain why chain smokers don’t get cancer?”
Arguing against the strict tobacco rules proposed by the government to curb smoking, Gupta said, “Sugar is also harmful and causes diabetes – no one can stop that.”
He further stated that the tobacco industry was being ‘unfairly targeted’. Incidentally, Gupta owns a beedi-making business worth hundreds of crores.
Earlier, Gandhi had said, “There is no Indian survey report to prove that tobacco consumption leads to cancer. All the studies are done abroad.”
“Cancer does not happen only because of tobacco. We have to study the Indian context, as four crore people in states like Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh are dependent on bidi-making through Tendupatta,” Gandhi had said.
He added the Committee has only sought for deferment of tobacco warnings till it looks into the whole issue with Indian context and not be driven by foreign surveys. The notification regarding amendment to the Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products (Packaging and Labeling) Rules, 2008 sought increase in the size of specified health warning from the current 40% to 85% of the principal display area of the package of tobacco products.
