Almost all sensible people were sceptical about the success of prohibition when it was introduced in Bihar by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. Experience at home and abroad had shown that prohibition has never succeeded in curbing liquor consumption, only in driving it underground. Nor has it prevented the poor at whom it was primarily directed by the Bihar Government from quenching their thirst with illicit, and very often, deadly brew.
The periodic deaths of the poor from the consumption of spurious and cheap liquor even in those States which have not enforced prohibition is proof that it is hard to stop people from consuming alcohol. Now, two years after prohibition was first imposed in Bihar, one of the poorest States which would forgo sizable tax revenue as a result, a survey conducted by a contemporary has thrown up interesting facts. It seems that the poor and the underprivileged sections, who were supposed to be the primary beneficiaries of the no-liquor policy, are its worst victims. Investigations of a select few prisons in the State revealed that a majority of the people undergoing imprisonment for violating prohibition belong to the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in disproportion to their population in the State. These are the very people who, it was claimed, deny their families’ food, clothing and education because they tend to spend their meagre incomes on cheap liquor.
As the survey reveals, those earning livelihoods through manual labour are the victims and not the beneficiaries of prohibition. By driving both the sale and consumption of liquor underground, prohibition has provided the criminal-police-neta nexus yet another avenue for making money. Prohibition in Bihar could not have succeeded given that in the adjoining States liquor continues to be freely available. In the early 50s and 60s, prohibition was enforced in Bombay but it worked only in name. Getting permits to buy liquor was not hard. Why, officially Gujarat has enforced prohibition for decades. But, it is public secret how it is observed in its violation with total impunity. Indeed, the police and the underground liquor syndicates have come to have a vested interest in prohibition because both the sellers and the consumers need to keep the police in good humour just in case it gets into its head to actually enforce one of the more impractical laws in the statute book.
Also, it is interesting to find that whereas the consumers in Bihar have been imprisoned, there is no credible evidence of the distributors of liquor suffering such punishment. It is also clear that the poor defying prohibition are more likely to be arrested than those from the middle and upper income groups since they have the means to stay out of trouble despite violating the law. Even now, it may not be too late for Nitish Kumar to admit failure and lift prohibition. Besides, in the poorly policed State, the burden of policing prohibition only detracts the authorities from more urgent governance issues. Pragmatism always wins over idealism. Human nature cannot be changed by edicts from on-high.
