– Arshad Shaikh
There are moments in a nation’s history when a technical piece of legislation also assumes a moral depth. The recent “Promotion and Regulation of Online Gaming Bill, 2025” aims to address issues like gaming addiction, mental health, and financial losses. Critics of the bill say that bans never work and the whole business will go underground or become part of the “grey market”. The proponents of the bill emphasise that in the current case of online money gaming, the question before the government was not freedom versus regulation. It was between being complicit in the exploitation of crores of our citizens and reining an innocuous looking character turning into a Frankenstein Monster.
The Illusion of Skill
Fantasy gaming websites insist that they are games of skill. Courts, looking to precedents in horse racing, tried this test of distinction. But sport is marked very precisely by the absence of predictability. To suggest that betting against Virat Kohli in favour of Rohit Sharma is an exercise of skill and not a bet on uncertainty is to blur the line between speculation and knowledge.
These sites are not only about unpredictable outcomes but are also mathematically biased against the user. Consider a tournament of 100 players where each is charged ₹100 as an entry fee. The entire pool is ₹10,000. The site stealthily deducts a 10% handling charge, ensuring the company is always in profit. So, if a person plays 10 such games, they would have lost all their initial money. In a typical tournament involving at least 1 crore (10 million) participants, the odds of winning are stated to be 1 in 1 crore.
Expecting anyone to play the game one crore times to achieve a win is not realistic. The “fantasy apps exploit the fact that “someone” does win (these winners appear in endorsement video ads), which psychologically encourages others to believe they too can win, despite the overwhelming mathematical odds against them. Even if a player manages to win a game, they are still destined to lose in the long term due to the underlying mathematical design. Thus, losing in these types of games is almost inevitable. What is presented in the guise of harmless diversion and a “time-pass” activity is actually a masterfully constructed channel of loss.
The Costs We Do Not Count
The debate of the ban on online gaming is typically in economic terms. Its backers reference the gaming industry as a multi-billion-dollar market that generates tax revenue, job creation, and foreign investment. Its critics refer to suffocation of innovation and driving the market into the underground. These rhetorical figures however mask the more fundamental costs – the suicides of youth drowned in interest-based loans, the dismantling of families, the diversion of funds that would be spent on nourishment, education, or medicine.
Statistics from across India are sobering. A nation-wise study reports that nearly a quarter of youngsters confess to stress and ill thoughts induced by online gaming. Cases of teens spending lakhs from their parents’ accounts aren’t exceptions but symptoms of an epidemic disease. There is a torn family behind every statistic, a lost youth to despair, a parent suffocating under debt. Should the government become a silent spectator amidst this meltdown of society? The bill is a small step in the right direction.
The Islamic Ethic of Play
From the Islamic perspective, the question resonates in clarity. The Qur’an (Surah al-Ma’idah 5:90-91) condemns “maysir” (chance betting/gambling) as a tool of the Satan sowing enmity between people and distracting them from the remembrance of God. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ warned against games of chance, playing the dice, and card playing when with monetary stakes.
The very definition of gambling is that fortune is bet upon unknowable outcomes outside the control of humankind. By that criteria, platforms like Dream-XYZ or XYZ-Rummy fall into the bracket of the prohibited with ease. Islam is not against recreation. Games that reinforce body and mind, that strengthen bonds without wasting duty or faith, are acceptable and even encouraged. But where play is a vehicle of economic exploitation and moral decay, it crosses the line into the “haram” (forbidden).
The Politics of Desire
The online gaming industry has been successful in capturing legitimacy through the rhetorical mobilisation of cricketing icons and A-grade actors. These celebrities urge the crores of people to take up fantasy leagues. Advertisements promise immediate riches, transforming sport into a further continuation of the gaming table. Here the distinction between public culture and private moneymaking is blurred in a dangerous way. The fact that ads have been in live games for years shows how little regulators have done to stop it.
The same government that is worried about inappropriate content in movies also allowed ads for surrogate gambling to appear during kids’ favourite TV times. When the government finally took action at the end of the term, it wasn’t just fixing a mistake in the law; it was also taking responsibility for its own actions. Critics say that prohibition leads to illegal activities. They are not wrong. But that can’t be a reason for the state to lower all standards. No society can prosper if it accepts gambling as a way to show skill and exploit the teeming millions to rake illegitimate profits for the “cunning few”.
Not the End of the Road
Outlawing online money game playing is not sufficient. Enforcing the law is difficult; illegal operators will persist; VPNs will evade censorship. And the state has to be careful about appearing hypocritical: targeting “online” fantasy apps but not “real/offline” underground betting rings or state lotteries would make the law selective. The ban must be supplemented by awareness messages, education in school in financial literacy, and instilling healthier habits of recreation. Instead of directing longing into fantasy apps, money needs to be spent on sporting infrastructure, public libraries, community centres.
The new law is flawed but is a step in the direction of recognising that not everything that glitters in the online economy is gold. But most important is to understand the concept of “why we are in this world”? Are we just here to make merry and vanish one day? Will we be raised up after death and appear before our Creator and give account of all our deeds, including how we spent our time and the monetary resources at our disposal? Without the fear of accountability of the Hereafter, building a moral society will always be a mirage, even bigger than that of online gaming.
