Modi Methylated

To be fair to Modi, both prohibition and its twin, bootlegging, have predated his tenure by several decades. Even the present hooch tragedy has only claimed about as many lives as the last major one did, in 1989, under Congress rule. Just as words like ‘bootlegging’ and ‘speakeasy’ (from the whispered codewords used to gain entry to the illegal drinking places) gained currency in America during the prohibition era of the 1920s, the word ‘potli’ (meaning plastic pouch, in which some 200 ml of hooch is sold for Rs 10 each) has been made popular in Gujarat. In upmarket apartments in Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar—in fact, across all of Gujarat—so-called ‘Indian Made Foreign Liquor’ is delivered at the doorstep by bootleggers, like milk bottles through an efficient dairy scheme. A whisky bottle in Gujarat has always cost less than in most other states, because the illicit business doesn’t have to pay whopping excise duty to the government. It’s difficult to calculate the excise revenue lost by the Gujarat government at the altar of prohibition—there is no recent benchmark of collection, as prohibition is several decades old. But going by Andhra Pradesh’s example, one can get a rough estimate: N.T. Rama Rao’s prohibition policy in 1994 had deprived the state of Rs 1,300 crore revenue in one year.

Even though hooch has also claimed lives in states where the manufacture, sale and consumption of alcohol is legal, such tragedies in Gujarat have been more frequent and larger. Since drinking is a furtive and legally risky activity, consumers want to maximise their kick. As only criminals are involved in producing this contraband, they have no scruples in meeting such demand by enriching alcohol with battery acid, urea or any other dangerous chemical.

Gujarat banned drinking in homage to Mahatma Gandhi, who considered it a destructive activity for the individual, family and society, and favoured state intervention for stopping it. While advocacy of restraint has been as ancient as enjoying a drink, prohibition became a strictly enforced sustained state policy for the first time only in the US in 1920s. We forget that even the Mahatma was a child of his times, influenced by contemporary global ideas. Apart from the Indian tradition, much of his pacifism, piety, austerity and ethics also came from the West, from the words and deeds of fringe sects like Quakers and people like Ruskin, Tolstoy, Thoreau and Emerson. His ideas about prohibition also owed a lot to the western “temperance movement” of the late 1800s and early 1900s, which engendered the American prohibition enforced by the 18th amendment to the US constitution and the Volstead Act. The prohibition years in the US (1920-33), also the Jazz Age, spawned a contraband economy in alcohol that led to the rise of the mob and notorious criminals like Al Capone, whose parallel in modern Gujarat was probably hooch king Abdul Latif, who left behind a crime empire of Rs 1,000 crore when he was killed in an encounter in 1997. The vast illegal empire the American prohibition era spawned corrupted the police and law enforcers completely, so much so that some officers received regular retainers to the tune of $3,00,000 a month. The era, captured in Fitzerald’s The Great Gatsby and the film The Untouchables, witnessed unprecedented gang war and violence and caused a sea change in how America viewed crime, violence, authority, the judicial system, and wealth and class. We still await the chroniclers of Gujarat to substantiate a parallel in attitudes here in the disco-dandia age.