Will Delhi Go Dry?

IT'S no storm in a tea cup. Delhi Chief Minister Sahib Singh Verma is about to stir up a neat peg of trouble for the capital's tipplers. If his latest brainwave—Verma envisages the imposition of severe restrictions on the availability of liquor—becomes a reality, it is not the Delhi government alone that will lose more than Rs 330 crore a year, an entire way of life will be bottled up by the moral brigade that is out to dampen the city's spirits. But can prohibition actually be enforced in a city where drinking has, since times immemorial, been a social activity for all occasions, for all seasons?

 "Why not?" queries Rajinder Gupta, Delhi's excise and transport minister, who has been assigned the task of ensuring that all bars and clubs located within 75 metres of educational institutions, places of worship and medical facilities are denied liquor licences. "A recent survey in a national magazine has shown that more than 80 per cent of India's men and women are in favour of prohibition. The lobby is getting stronger in the wake of the Haryana experiment." But what about all those people out there who raise a toast to whatever it is that catches their fancy every evening and proclaim, "I drink, therefore I am"? Jug Suraiya, senior editor, The Times of India , describes prohibition as "archaic and preposterous". Says he: "What kind of message will prohibition in the country's capital send to the rest of the world? That Indians can't be trusted with small things like liquor?" 

Although prohibition isn't in the BJP manifesto, its government in the capital has been steadily tightening its excise laws to facilitate a major crackdown on bars and liquor outlets. Till 1995-96, Delhi had 28 dry days a year. This year, it has gone up to 47. The government's target is 365 liquor-less days, year after year. The dreaded drive has already begun: several of Delhi's luxury hotels, clubs and bars face the prospect of their licences not being renewed when they come up for consideration. Excise Commissioner Sanjeev Sahai is said to have drawn up a list of 50 such establishments.

There is, of course, a gnawing fear that the sudden imposition of prohibition might boomerang on the BJP in the long run. The party's Delhi unit chief, Kedar Nath Sahni, accepts that Delhiites have to be thoroughly educated before prohibition laws are introduced. "Otherwise," he says, "the move may not succeed especially because, unlike the ruling party in Haryana, the BJP had not warned the electorate about it." But he is quick to add that the government would not mind incurring financial losses: "We are more concerned about the health of the people. Once prohibition is enforced, the government will no longer have to spend large sums on tackling alcoholism and its attendant social problems."

 But given the intrinsically fractious nature of the debate, there can be no pat conclusions. Says Devin Narang, vice-president of the All-India Distillers' Association: "Prohibition hasn't succeeded anywhere in the world. In any case, prohibition is no solution to alcoholism. Only education can eradicate it. If AIDS is a problem, should sex be banned?"

 But Jagdish Mamgain, president of Swatantra Prahari, an organisation spearheading a pro-prohibition movement, feels New Delhi is ready for a blanket ban on liquor. "It will be more successful here than it has been in Haryana and Andhra Pradesh because people here are more civilised," he says. Are we, he wonders, balking because "there are 1,200 foreigners in Delhi working in the embassies"? "They can be given special licences," he says.

 "That'll be a bit much," says a press counsellor of a western embassy. "It wou- ldn't be a great idea making us queue up for liquor licences. Isn't this a free country anymore?" Journalist Saeed Naqvi agrees that such measures are essentially self-defeating: "Maulana Azad was once asked whether prostitution should be banned. His answer was: these things are like a city's drainage. If you stop them, the drainage gets clogged up and the muck flows on to the streets and into your house."

 Prohibition, its opponents assert, is an invitation for bootleggers to move in and take over the liquor trade. "Wherever prohibition has been enforced, the government is losing crores of rupees to illegal distillers and smugglers," says Devin Narang. Jug Suraiya agrees: "Bombay became India's mafia capital because of Morarji Desai's prohibition policy." Will Delhi be allowed to go the Bombay way by its self-appointed moral police?