Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The prohibition paradox

The debate over banning alcohol consumption is largely political; the real solution lies in a temperance movement

India is on the move. Nitish Kumar may promise to ban alcohol in Bihar but 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 smart.

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 single malt Scotch. They argue over the merits of Bowmore 12 and Bowmore Darkest in expensive hotel bars. A supposedly austere Bharatiya Janata Party (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 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 alcohol 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 a politician of Kumar's experience 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 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 can'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. Nor is this all. Whisky, gin and rum don't sound like intoxicants when passed off as IMFL - Indian-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 exorcised. 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 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 Symonds fell ill in Delhi, Gandhi took him into 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 Symonds 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 Modi's reputedly prudish BJP in the scheduled Assembly elections.

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.