Is prohibition the answer?

June 23, 2017 12:02 am | Updated August 20, 2017 11:56 am IST

People engaged in hospitality industry who have become jobless following the Supreme Court orders prohibiting sale of liquor along the highways, holding placards taking part in a demonstration at City Centre in Chandigarh on April 03, 2017.

People engaged in hospitality industry who have become jobless following the Supreme Court orders prohibiting sale of liquor along the highways, holding placards taking part in a demonstration at City Centre in Chandigarh on April 03, 2017.

LEFT | Hartman de Souza

 

 

Whether or not people can drink is a debate fuelled by upper-caste hypocrisy, a mix of religious guilt and bigotry

My late father, Peter, would have spat derision on this debate. When PM Morarji Desai visited Goa to trumpet the virtues of prohibition, Peter wanted to welcome him at the airport, greeting him with a garland of chamber pots. He was pipped by organisations loyal to coconut and cashew feni lining the road carrying those same artefacts.

The Morarji era

Peter’s ire surfaced earlier. In 1968 he discovered you couldn’t walk into a Mumbai store and walk out with a bottle. Stubborn, unwilling to visit a fabled Goan ‘auntie’ in Bandra, he went the ‘official’ route for a ‘permit’ to bonded supply. But he also needed a medical certificate admitting he was a confirmed drunkard. Peter never forgave the prohibitionists.

With Morarji at the helm of crusades between 1949 and 1962, prohibition ruled. A paltry amount of ‘foreign liquor’ was officially allowed; the economics of liquor sidelined. Peter’s ‘drunkenness’ was saved by a law in 1963 allowing permits for over-40s, doctors endorsing their ‘need’. In 1968, those over 21 could drink beer and toddy with less than 5% alcohol without a permit while the minimum age lowered to over-30s for those needing stronger potions.

Maharashtra was forced to change in 1972 after more than 100 people died consuming rotgut. While it became progressively easier to buy liquor, few Mumbai-ites know that, medical drunkenness apart, they still need a ‘permit’ offering proof they drink in spite of the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949. Legally, a restaurant must have a segregated area — a ‘permit room’ — where licensed drunkards can be served. In 2012, let us not forget, Mumbai’s ACP Vasant Dhoble, holier than even the Pope, tried to implement the letter of the law before he was put to pasture. As has happened and continues to happen, if the state wants to get you, the state will. Moreover, where is the evidence that imposing prohibition helped?

Driving it underground

Mizoram junked prohibition after 18 years. Haryana imposed it, lifting it like Andhra Pradesh. In Tamil Nadu since the 1940s, it comes awake during elections and is then quickly forgotten. In Gujarat, dry since 1960, you just need an app for home delivery. Nagaland, dry since 1989, depends on neighbouring Assam for its flow of liquor. In Bihar, the saviours are Nepal, Jharkhand, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh. An editorial in this paper (April 20, 2016) hit the nail on the head: “Banning the sale and consumption of alcohol,” wrote The Hindu, “has in this country’s experience, not been an effective check against its use. It has only criminalised the activity, with disastrous consequences for individual health, the economy and administration — these include bootlegging, liquor mafias, spurious liquor, and a complicit police.”

When Peter passed away, we found in his wardrobe, behind his suits, a treasure trove of rare whiskeys given as presents by his many admirers. At his wake — part of the Goan Catholic way of life — we opened every single bottle and saw them to the end.

Threat remains

And yet, a real threat remains. Whether one quaffs a good single malt first savoured in 1876, or some excellent Mahua wine around possibly a few centuries before that — leaving the safe English-speaking world we inhabit — the discussion whether people ought to drink or not is fuelled by upper-caste hypocrisy, a complex mix of religious guilt and bigotry.

It’s not that different from whether one can legally eat beef or not.

(Hartman de Souza is a theatre person, journalist and author of ‘Eat Dust — Mining and Greed in Goa’)

RIGHT |Shaibal Gupta

 

 

 

The agenda of prohibition is indeed a rational choice for India, with its extreme poverty and infant capitalism

The number of liquor addicts worldwide is staggering, approximately two billion. Several studies have found that high alcohol intake increases blood pressure and enhances the risk of stroke and liver cirrhosis. In developing countries, those who drink tend to do so heavily. For them, alcohol addiction has both adverse health and social consequences, as diverting the resource away from basic necessities such as food and shelter affects the welfare of other members of the household, especially children and women.

Ruining households

Alcohol is a State subject and each State government has the right to decide whether to go for prohibition or not. Total ‘prohibition’ was introduced earlier in Gujarat and later in Bihar. In poorer States like Bihar, the justification for prohibition is even stronger as alcoholism among men from the economically vulnerable sections is even more harmful, leading to economic ruin of their families. Thus the enforcement of prohibition in Gujarat may not be that serious, but it is an important social agenda for a State like Bihar.

More recently, the issue of prohibition has reached the national stage. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi had to acknowledge the contribution of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar in the realm of prohibition during Prakash Utsav in Patna, where the 350th birth anniversary of Guru Gobind Singh was being celebrated. If the prohibition were pan-national, it would have been an easier proposition; to enforce prohibition in a State is a Herculean task, with issues like porous borders with neighbouring States and the proactive agenda of liquor traders.

Thus, prohibition creates a huge enforcement challenge. Apart from the plethora of administrative problems, the contrarian ‘elite’ opinion, even if small, also plays an important role as a disincentive for prohibition or an ideological lubricant for legal sanction and ultimate enforcement. In this scenario, it becomes immaterial what Mahatma Gandhi or the Directive Principles of State Policy have opined on prohibition. After seven decades in independent India, one has to revisit many foundational issues of nation-building. It is againstS this backdrop that one has to calibrate the justification for prohibition in a poor State like Bihar.

Why India needs a ban

The stage of development of a society depends on the surplus it generates. Most of the developed western countries, in their initial phase of capitalist transformation, were mindful about productive investment. In North America and European states, the impetus for prohibition was driven more under the rubric of ‘pietistic’ and ‘temperance’ movement. The former represented moralistic ethos and the latter gastronomical options and both were essentially extensions of the ‘Protestant ethic’ which, as German sociologist Max Weber explained, laid the foundation of capitalism.

The Protestant ethic essentially revolved around frugal spending and saving, which lead to productive investment. That was the bedrock on which capitalism was built. That is why ‘pietistic’ and ‘temperance’ movements supported prohibition, which facilitated capitalist accumulation and the industrial revolution. Even though the American Civil War was fought on the agenda of slave labour, both its protagonist and antagonist were united on the question of prohibition. It symbolised both the aspirations of modern capitalism and diabolic form of buccaneering accumulation. Both these trends had an identical belief that prohibition helps accumulation and it was in force in the U.S. till the Great Depression. From this development perspective, the agenda of prohibition is indeed a rational choice for India, with its extreme poverty and infant capitalism.

(Shaibal Gupta is Member Secretary, Asian Development Research Institute, Patna)

CENTRE |M.A. Baby

 

 

 

Banning food and beverages is neither desirable nor feasible. It puts unnecessary fetters on freedoms

Banning food and beverages is neither desirable nor feasible in a civilised society. It would interfere with social and customary practices, religious rites and rituals and put unnecessary fetters on individual freedoms. In most of countries in the world and in Indian States like Gujarat and Nagaland where consumption of liquor is banned either totally or partially, breaches in law are more common than their observance.

The U.S., which experimented with prohibition for 13 years from 1920, finally lifted it finding it to be impractical and interfering. For this, the 18th amendment, by which prohibition was introduced, was repealed, the only time that a part of the U.S. Constitution has been revoked. The indirect ban on meat consumption being imposed by the Central government and the attempt of the erstwhile United Democratic Front (UDF) government in Kerala to introduce prohibition of liquor belong to the category of draconian steps that interfere with individual and social freedoms.

Policy moderation

The hasty decision on the ban of liquor outlets and bars taken by the then UDF government had more to do with inner-party rivalry within the ruling Congress than any well-thought-out scheme for social engineering. Apart from crippling the tourism industry with its adverse impact on the State’s finances and employment opportunities, it led to an unprecedented increase in crimes relating to drug abuse and bootlegging. As against 974 cases registered in Kerala in 2013, the State police registered 1,836 drug cases in the first six months of 2016 after the introduction of partial liquor ban. Moreover, as observed by a Delhi-based senior Congress leader from Kerala, with the closure of bars, a lot of homes turned into bars, disturbing domestic peace and amity.

The new Left Democratic Front (LDF) policy has been announced after carefully assessing the impact of the closure of bars, the recommendations of the Udayabhanu Commission and the experiences of liquor ban in different parts of the world. The new excise policy is in tune with the LDF election manifesto, which proposed voluntary abstinence in place of prohibition. In a State that has high per capita alcohol consumption, the new policy recognises the dangers inherent in the excessive consumption of alcohol. It proposes a vigorous campaign against alcoholism and to set up de-addiction centres in every district.

The policy, which takes into account the restrictions imposed by the Supreme Court on highway bars, also provides for reviving the toddy trade by permitting its sale in upmarket hotels. Liquor would now be available in upmarket hotels and domestic lounges of airports. The government will scrap the former UDF regime’s policy of closing down 10% of liquor outlets every year. We hope the new policy will help the State retain its prime position in the tourism map of the country as a favourite destination for corporate getaways, meetings and seminars.

While conscientious objections of prohibitionist lobbies and religious organisations are understandable, the hue and cry being raised by the opposition parties is politically motivated. The world over, Catholic catechism does not directly ban alcohol consumption. It only advocates temperance, advising Catholics to avoid every kind of excess. There are religious orders like the Trappists which have become justly famous for their beer breweries. In comparison, the policies of communist parties including the CPI(M), which enjoin their cadres to practice abstinence and strictly prohibit drunkenness among their leaders, are more stringent.

(M.A. Baby is a Polit Bureau member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist))

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