Patna: As Bihar stands on the cusp of prohibition, retired officials, traders and politicians remember how the last attempt at banning liquor – from 1977 to June 1980 – failed miserably with a nexus of corrupt officials, policemen, smugglers and bootleggers compromising the system.
The Janata Party government led by Prime Minister Morarji Desai had formed a national policy on prohibition. However, it could be enforced only in the states where the Janata Party was in power. Bihar, with Karpoori Thakur as chief minister, was one of them.
With liquor shops closed, a large number of people switched over to ‘toddy’ (fermented palm sap) as a substitute. To meet the skyrocketing demand, bootleggers started manufacturing spurious toddy by mixing ammonium chloride in chura (flattened rice) and water to ferment it. Many drinkers regularly fell ill due to the poisonous chemical-laced drink, some died too.
“Subsidiary industries to manufacture ayurvedic medicines like ‘som ras’, ‘shakti ras’, ‘madhu ras’ and ‘joshvardhak ras’ were established by unscrupulous elements,” said a retired excise official. “These were actually fermented jaggery-based drinks. The state government itself issued proper licenses for manufacturing these ‘medicines’, which were used as substitutes for liquor.”
People also resorted to denatured spirit or industrial alcohol, and it led to many tragedies. In desperation, some people would get big bottles of spirit-based homoeopathic medicines and drink them, The Telegraph reported.
Then, Bihar – including present-day Jharkhand – was surrounded by West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Nepal. Smuggling of liquor from these places was rampant. Manufacturing of illicit country liquor became very common in the river floodplains (diara) of Bihar. Enforcement was negligible in tribal areas in what is now Jharkhand.
Foreign liquor retailer association president Nawal Kishore Singh said the distilleries functioning in Bihar at that time also had a hand in compromising prohibition.
“They (the distilleries) would manufacture liquor and get excise permits to send it to states and Union territories where prohibition was not in place, but would distribute it in Bihar itself,” Nawal said. “This game was carried on with the help of corrupt officials of the excise department. Constables who were supposed to accompany the liquor-laden trucks to their destinations from Bihar took money and rested at home.”
Nawal remembered that bootleggers developed a courier network to supply liquor to households, officials and politicians.
“They used to charge a fee for this, and it went unchecked right under the nose of excise and police officers on duty,” he added.
“The government that time had not prepared at all to implement prohibition,” said former chief minister Jagannath Mishra, who succeeded Karpoori Thakur in June 1980 when the Congress made a comeback. “It was enforced suddenly, with Morarji Desai assuring that the Centre would meet the revenue loss.”
Mishra, who has been Bihar chief minister thrice, said there was neither effective administrative machinery nor enough police or excise personnel to enforce prohibition.
“I called a meeting of all district magistrates in the state and they expressed inability to enforce prohibition,” he remembered. “They all said that smugglers, bootleggers and unscrupulous elements were having an upper hand on administration, and the revenue loss of the state was also not being met.”
Indira Gandhi, who had succeeded Morarji as PM, called a meeting of all chief ministers to reconsider the prohibition policy. At the meeting, Mishra rooted for abandoning the policy. Indira too thought it would be practical to end it.
“Thus total prohibition came to an end in Bihar and other states,” Mishra said. “This stopped rampant hooch tragedies, people falling ill, loss of state revenue and law and order related issues connected to them. I am in favour of prohibition, but it can be successful only with people’s support – not with laws or enforcement.”