The Booze Benchmark :Gujarat's Hype & Hypocrisy
BY R.K.MISRA
If pride and prejudices are pesky, both
hype and hypocrisy hurt.
Gujarat
and it’s ‘model’ have been the toast of the Indian season ever since
it’s Chief Minister , Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister in 2014.This
includes it’s liquor prohibition policy which has adherents like Bihar now where Nitish Kumar
came to power after knocking the wind out of
Modi’s sails!
Billowing in the political clouds ever
since, are propounded perceptions of a ‘dry’ India. Kumar could do with a
closer look at adversary Modi’s ‘model’ state before giving wings to his
national vision.
Proud and boastful of the fact that it has been the only state
in the country which was born ‘dry’ and continues to remain so till date, Gujarat’s
much hyped liquor ‘totalitarianism’ took a humpty-dumpty like fall last week
when over 20 people died after consuming hooch near Surat. What has now become
a standard drill after decades of practice,is in place. Newly anointed Chief Minister
Vijay Rupani is making all the right noises .Top cops-regional and district
heads-transferred, smaller fry suspended .The anti-terrorist squad (ATS)chief takes charge of investigations. A three man
top cop panel headed by additional director general of police (ADGP),also looks
into the matter and submits it’s report to the state home department head. Within
24 hours over a thousand country liquor cases are registered. Carton loads are
being seized at entry checkpoints into the state. A full blooded search for the
culprit methanol is under way. Blah, blah, blah and the farce goes on.
Consumption or possession of liquor
without a valid permit is a non-bailable offence in the state. A person
arrested on either count has to be produced in court to be bailed out. And yet
it oozes Bacchus brew from every nook and cranny of its ample frame.
Booze, as the upwardly mobile call it,
is lucrative business and according to conservative estimates, a Rs 30,000
crore annual turnover, pure black money
spewing industry. While Prime Minister Modi may have pulled out all the stops
to unearth indian black money stashed abroad, his decade and a quarter year
stint as chief minister of the state,failed to dent the business. In fact, to
be fair to him, no chief minister who held office in the state was ever able to
stem the flow.
The business has three components. At
the bottom of the pyramid is the poor man’s drink-hooch, lattha or moonshine. Then
follows the desi or country liquor which is the preferred drink of rural Gujarat followed by brewery liquor at
the apex(rum, whisky, gin, vodka etc).Hooch is the preferred drink of the urban
labour class while ‘desi’ distilled
largely for captive consumption in villages ranks safer and a notch
higher. The fruit liquor ‘mahua’ ranks in this category .With a consumer base
of the middle and affluent class in cities and towns, Indian Made Foreign
Liquor (IMFL) as brewery made liquor is called in official parlance, holds
sway. Country liquor is a cottage industry but brewery liquor flows into the
state from MP, Rajasthan, Maharashtra even Punjab and Haryana.
Lets take the case of Gujarat’s biggest
city Ahmedabad. A network of about 1000 bootleggers sell anywhere between 1.5 to2 lakh litres of
moonshine per day. Women outnumber men in this business. This is besides the
IMFL business where the brand of your choice is home delivered to you. The
trade is techno-savvy and ‘whats app’ and other such applications come in
handy. Surat is reported to guzzle
50,000 litres per day and almost 70 per cent of the 18,000 villages in the
state brew their own country liquor. All major cities report high consumption
and rural areas are no exception. There are 61,000 health permit holders in the
state and the average daily consumption of alcohol to permit holders is put at
around Rs 75 lakhs worth.
No bootlegger can operate in Gujarat
without police connivance and every ‘point’ of operation has to be properly
negotiated for the amount to be paid to the cop which goes right upto the top
and from there to the political top brass. The cops may be sloppy in policing
but would be the envy of management experts in planning and distribution of
ill-gotten spoils.
Thus it is the huge amount of unadulterated
black money greasing the administrative-political system in Gujarat that ensures
a high decibel sound and light show only for the benefit of the masses with little or no follow-up
action. Take the case of the 2009 hooch tragedy in Ahmedabad where 150 people
lost their lives. Modi, then the chief minister, made all the appropriate noises.
A Commission of Inquiry was instituted with former High Court judge K.M.Mehta
as the chairman. The panel submitted its report in 2011 and pin drop silence
thereafter. The Gujarat Vidhan Sabha was quick to amend the pertinent Act provisioning
for even death penalty for those convicted in spurious liquor cases. The Bill
was cleared by the then Governor Dr Kamala Beniwal. Not a single person has got
life imprisonment thereafter, let alone terminal punishment.
The whole business of prohibition in
Gujarat is a big charade in which everyone is happy and no one emerges the
poorer except the people. Gujarat is soggy wet so those who want to drink,get
enough of it but for a price. The cop is happy,he gets his cut and the
politician in power moreso because he gets a fair share as well besides the rip
off from transfers and postings for playing favourites. Right from the
sub-inspector to the DGP, the transfers are all at the behest of the Home
department and the politicians who preside over it. The bootlegger is happy because
he still manages to make money for himself despite all the pricks and cuts. It
is only the honest tax payer who gets
fobbed because the state loses a huge amount of money in excise and allied duties. Never mind this common man,
he was in any case, born to bear the burden of the cross. Moonshine for the
earthy, sunshine for the dirty!
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