With assembly elections due in Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Kerala, the policy of prohibition is again up for grabs. This is partly because of the perceived challenge of the Bharatiya Janata Party which is thought to look askance at whatever might be denounced as Western indulgence, and partly because prohibition is thought to have moral appeal. No one cares sufficiently about the damage done by excessive drinking to propose realistic remedies that can be carried out.
Thus, Nitish Kumar has promised to ban alcohol in Bihar if his party is returned to power. Tamil Nadu’s Paattali Makkal Katchi and Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam have also agreed to pressurise the ruling All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. Like Mr Kumar, the former Tamil Nadu chief minister, M Karunanidhi, also says that if his party is voted to power it will make “serious efforts” to bring back prohibition. Meanwhile, Kerala’s chief minister, Oomen Chandy, has already started the process of introducing prohibition in stages. It began on August 21, 2014.
Nevertheless, India is on the move in a different direction. It’s no longer the India of the 1950s and 1960s when Mahatma Gandhi’s denunciation of conspicuous consumption still influenced thinking and Jawaharlal Nehru preached austerity. The All-India Wine Producers’ Association is gloating over 21 per cent higher sales. Nashik’s vintage lubricates more and more upper middle class dinners as the liberal policies initiated by P.V. Narasimha Rao and continued by Narendra Modi enable enterprising Indians to become rich and therefore smart in what is seen as the Western way.
Men who knew only Indian whisky until a few years ago and whose grandfathers probably drank arrack (if they drank strong liquor at all) won’t touch anything but expensive single malt Scotch nowadays. A supposedly austere BJP rules in Delhi, sangh parivar louts attack discos and dance halls, Valentine’s Day cards drive Hindu purists to fury, while the ever-inventive Smriti Irani tries to camouflage Christmas. But as a leading English aristocrat, the Duke of Bedford, observed 20 years after independence, living in an English way is becoming more and more fashionable for Indians.
We all have stories about the ingenious methods adopted by hotel, club and restaurant bars to beat prohibition restrictions. The bigger problem is at society’s other extreme where the menace of illicit liquor spiked with pesticides or polish kills hundreds of poor people every year. That should surely have taught politicians of experience like Mr Kumar and Mr Karunanidhi that prohibition is grossly counter-productive. The only way of restricting alcohol consumption lies in a strong temperance movement, as Indira Gandhi said more than once, not in pious but unenforceable laws riddled with loopholes.
My childhood holidays were spent in a part of Mr Kumar’s state where mahua trees flowered naturally along the gushing Nilabaran river. There were wild bears in those days and they could sometimes be seen staggering tipsily after gorging on the nectar-rich mahua flowers that carpeted the road outside our bungalow. Needless to say, the locals didn’t neglect the mahua either. It was their culture, a lifestyle they couldn’t do without. The hundreds of thousands of licensed country liquor shops all over India testify to the government’s readiness to make money from something it pretends to condemn.
Tamil Nadu is possibly the only Indian state where the government enjoys a monopoly of the retail trade in liquor. TASMAC, the public sector liquor store chain, has raked in one-third of all state government revenues ever since Jayalalithaa nationalised/monopolised all retail trade in liquor during her earlier (2001-06) stint as chief minister.
Nor is this all. Whisky, gin and rum don’t sound like intoxicants when passed off as IMFL – India Made Foreign Liquor. They become an even more innocuous “potable alcohol” when exported.
It’s possible to delude ourselves with hypocritical semantics because the scourge of poisonous illicit liquor doesn’t affect society’s single-malt imbibing leaders. It’s unlikely that any reader of this column knows anyone who actually drinks what American speakeasies called “moonshine” in the prohibition years, unless it is the scruffy youth who washes the condo’s cars. The plight of that class doesn’t shape policy. Those who are killed in toddy shops around mills, factories, labour lines and Dalit or Adivasi bustees are not missed; their deaths don’t inspire rigorous inspection of stills, breweries and drinking dens.
Callousness is compounded by presenting alcoholism not as a social danger but as a mythic evil that colonialism foisted on us. References to soma juice in the Hindu epics or the role of rice beer in certain religious rituals is forgotten. Our politicians speak of purging society of the demon drink in the way a possessed person has to be exorcized. Article 47 of the Constitution’s directive principles of state policy sustains this notion of a nanny state that must save citizens from pollution by stamping out “intoxicating drinks and of drugs … except for medicinal purposes”.
That reminds me of Richard Symonds, an English Quaker, who was attached to Mahatma Gandhi as a young man and whom I got to know in his last years in Oxford where he lived. When Richard fell ill in Delhi, Gandhi took him to Birla House to nurse. They used to argue about many matters including prohibition until Gandhi agreed to treat beer as a medicine for two reasons, so Richard told me. First, it tasted bitter; second, Gandhi’s landlady in London forced him to drink porter, a supposedly strength-giving dark brown malt brew, when he was unwell.
Sadly, the current debate has no bearing on health, hygiene, alcoholism, temperance or poison brews. It’s only about election tactics. Local parties in Bihar, Kerala and Tamil Nadu have suddenly rediscovered the virtues of abstinence only to upstage and pre-empt Mr Modi’s reputedly prudish BJP in the scheduled assembly elections.
It’s so much a question of opportunism that Jayalalithaa might yet outsmart all her adversaries by announcing a new prohibition policy – possibly to commence on Gandhi Jayanthi – and deprive the Opposition of a unifying cause. Some expect her strategically to combine prohibition – even a staggered policy such as her mentor, the late M. G. Ramachandran once attempted.
Tamil Nadu does have a lineage of principled prohibition. As prime minister of the old Madras Presidency (1937-39), Chakravarti Rajagopalachari introduced prohibition for the first time in India, starting with his native Salem district. The post-Independence Congress governments, in which he served as chief minister (1952-54), followed suit. Despite heavy pressure on the state’s finances, they refused to budge but ever the realist, Rajaji also introduced sales tax for the first time in the world to compensate for revenue losses caused by prohibition. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s C.N. Annadurai also introduced prohibition, but death tragically cut short his regime in 1969.
Prohibition politics ignore both the killer brews that polish off Indians at one end of the social scale and the ostentatiously vulgar lifestyles that dominate the other.
