Token prohibition takes a toll in Gujarat

The hooch tragedy that snuffed out 45 lives in Ahmedabad and Botad districts again lays bare the hollowness of the State prohibition law. While the affluent access premium alcohol through a time-tested network of bootleggers, the system leaves the underclass most vulnerable, reports Mahesh Langa

Dinesh Virgama’s mother (in blue saree) mourning the death of her son, along with a relative outside her home in Rojid village, in Gujarat. (Below): A relative of Dinesh Virgama clicks a picture of the deceased’s photograph that is in a frame kept at his home after he died drinking hooch (illicit liquor) in Rojid village.VIJAY SONEJI VIJAY SONEJI

Jigar Dungrani, all of 27, has done alright in life so far. He owns more than 60 acres of farmland. He hails from a political family — his father, Dharmesh, heads the Barwala taluka unit of the Congress, mother Ranjanben is the leader of Opposition in the taluka panchayat. The young Patel himself is the sarpanch of Rojid village, 126 km away from Ahmedabad, on the highway to Bhavnagar. But Dungrani is going around with an incensed look these days. Rojid, a settlement of 3,500-odd people, is among the villages dotting Botad and Ahmedabad districts where an avoidable tragedy is unfolding. Twelve people have died here after drinking countrymade liquor or hooch laced with chemicals on the evening of July 25; the overall toll in half-a-dozen villages of rural Ahmedabad and Botad districts is 45 dead and counting; over 75 are still battling for their lives in various hospitals in Ahmedabad and Bhavnagar. 

In March this year, in a letter to the local police, Dungrani had warned about the easy access to liquor in the village. “I had repeatedly made representations to the police and revenue authorities about bootleggers having a free run of the village,” he said. Every time, the police would conduct a raid on bootleggers or local breweries.

“It’s like a fixed match between the cops and the bootleggers. On paper, the police would claim Rojid village is peopled by teetotallers but in reality, take a round in the evening and you would come across at least 50 persons completely drunk and roaming the village streets,” he said.

Deaths in a village

Rojid village, with a double-digit death toll, presents a picture of all-pervading grief and despair.

Rajubhai Virgama, 50, is sitting with a bunch of people in his house, mourning the death of his younger brother Dinesh. The deceased, a daily wager who used to work in the village farms owned by Patels or Patidars, the dominant caste in the village, has left behind a two-and-a-half-year-old boy. Dinesh’s wife left for another man when the boy was barely a year old.

“He bought a potli (plastic pouch containing 250 ml liquor) and drank on Monday night (July 25). Next morning, he had to be taken to Bhavnagar hospital where he died within a few hours,” said Rajubhai, who is deputy sarpanch of the village and runs a grocery shop.

“Potli culture has destroyed us. Those who died are extremely poor, landless labourers who used to work as daily wagers in the farms. They have no other source of livelihood,” said 60-year-old Maganbhai Parmar, whose nephew Shanti Parmar, 50, was also among the casualties.

My father came from Ahmedabad. The family members had gathered in the native village for a religious ceremony. He [Shanti Parmar] drank one potli and died in his bed. We are very poor and have no land. We work as labourers in the farms owned by Patels. Many of us don’t even have our own house,” said Kamla, Shanti’s daughter.

For Mavji Chavda in Akru village nearby, the loss of his two sons to hooch is a tragedy he said his family would possibly never recover from. “What can we say now?” the inconsolable 69-year-old told presspersons after performing their last rites.

Ironically enough, another victim from the village was 32-year-old Vipulbhai Kavathiya, a bootlegger who used to sell countrymade liquor to the villagers.

Brief conversations with the grieving families brought out the ugly side of the prohibition policy in Gujarat. They talked about the thriving nexus of bootleggers or liquor mafias and the police with the blessings of the political class. Furious villagers blamed the police for turning a blind eye to the growing menace of bootleggers who freely supply and sell locally-brewed liquor that is often laced with chemicals to the poor and daily wagers who cannot afford Indian-made foreign liquor (IMFL) and imported spirits.

Asked about easy availability of liquor in the village given the prohibition in the State, those sitting in the verandah of Virgama’s house sipping tea and smoking beedi said in one voice that liquor flows like water in the villages. “Either enforce the prohibition strictly and don’t allow any bootlegging anywhere or remove it completely and let everyone drink if they want to,” Virgama said.

Investigation and arrests

Police investigation has revealed that the spurious liquor was supplied from Chokdi village, a major hub of manufacturing and supply of countrymade liquor in the area. It was made by mixing water with methyl alcohol or methanol, a highly poisonous industrial solvent, and sold to villagers for ₹20 per pouch.

The FIRs lodged by police name bootleggers who were allegedly involved in supplying the hooch to the villages.

However, villagers contended that there have been many more deaths than what’s being counted in Gandhinagar. “There are a few people who died even before reaching any hospital. The real number would be very high,” said Rajubhai, deputy sarpanch of Rojid.

The police swung into action with multiple FIRs lodged under the State prohibition law and various sections of the IPC.

At least 38 persons have been booked, out of which 15 have been arrested and charged with IPC sections such as 302 (murder), 328 (causing hurt by means of poison) and Section 67 (1a) of the Gujarat Prohibition Act for adulteration of alcohol and preparing of hooch.

The police, however, have not invoked Section 66 of the Prohibition Act in the FIRs, which covers consumption of liquor in the State, as that would have resulted in the victims being booked as well, for consuming the alcohol. 

Besides the arrests, the State government, in a bid to show decisive action, suspended six police officials and transferred two IPS officers, the Superintendents of Police of Ahmedabad (Rural) and Botad.

“We are committed to prohibition and would never compromise on its implementation,” declared Gujarat’s Junior Home Minister Harsh Sanghavi on Wednesday. He said the police will file a charge sheet in 10 days to ensure quick justice and the government will also appoint a special public prosecutor to fight the case.

The Ahmedabad-Botad hooch tragedy is the worst in Gujarat in a decade. The last major hooch calamity was reported from Surat in 2016 when more than 20 migrant textiles workers had died after consuming adulterated alcohol in rural Surat.

Earlier, in 2009, more than 150 people had died in Ahmedabad in Gujarat’s worst hooch tragedy. Previous major tragedies include the death of 132 people in Vadodara and 32 in Viramgam, Ahmedabad in 1989 and of over a hundred people in Ahmedabad in 1976. However, every year, around 8-10 persons die of hooch in the State.

Law and amendments

In India, Gujarat is one of the ‘dry’ States where manufacturing and sale of liquor is banned. As per the Gujarat Prohibition Act, 1949, police can arrest a person for purchasing, consuming, or serving alcohol without a valid permit with punishment ranging from three months to five years in prison.

A 2017 amendment stipulated that people who create a ruckus or harass others in an inebriated condition could face a jail term of up to three years and not less than a year. The law also empowers the police to arrest persons entering from other States in a drunken state.

An earlier amendment enacted in 2009 after adulterated liquor killed 157 persons in Ahmedabad made the manufacture, stocking and even transportation of “laththa”, a countrymade brew, a capital offence if it resulted in deaths of people who consumed the brew. “When there has been death of any person by the consumption of the said laththa (hooch)… the person who has manufactured, kept, sold or arranged to make a drink or distributed laththa, shall, on conviction, be punished with death or imprisonment for life and shall also be liable to fine,” the law states.

Gujarat, from where Gandhi hailed, is perhaps the only one in the country to have prohibition since 1960, after the reorganisation of Bombay into the separate States of Maharashtra and Gujarat. 

The political consensus

In Bihar, which has hogged the headlines in recent years after it became a ‘dry’ State in 2016, there have been calls from several quarters both in the ruling and opposition ranks for a relook after prohibition-related cases choked the judicial system and hooch killed hundreds over the past six years, including at least 115 people this year alone. In Gujarat, however, there is near consensus on prohibition among all the major political parties and political figures. Even a new player in the State’s political landscape, Arvind Kejriwal, whose Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) is trying to gain a foothold in the upcoming Assembly election this year, said if voted to power, the AAP government would “actually implement the prohibition law which is just on paper under the BJP regime”.

No political party or politician worth his salt in Gujarat can afford to oppose the prohibition law, which is closely attached to the tag of the State being “safe” on the law-and-order front and vis-à-vis women.

Lately, in what is the fag end of a long political innings, former Chief Minister and Union Minister Shankersinh Vaghela has become an unlikely ambassador for removing prohibition in the State. In his heyday, Vaghela boasted about implementing the policy strictly as Chief Minister during the mid-1990s and eliminating Abdul Latif, Gujarat’s largest liquor bootlegger and mafia don of the time, in a police encounter. He now advocates that the tax accruals from alcohol sales could be spent on the poor and marginalised and to help improve health, education and other social indices in which the State is a laggard.

“Prohibition law shows our hypocrisy. It is the single biggest source of corruption running into thousands of crores of rupees per year in the State. The government and the Opposition should come forward and have a dialogue with stakeholders and do away with it,” Vaghela said after the recent deaths.

The former Chief Minister claimed that every year, bootleggers pay around ₹5,000 crore to the police as “hafta” or bribe to ply their illicit trade.

Entrenched interests

Every year, the police conduct raids periodically and recover IMFL worth ₹100-₹150 crore smuggled from States such as Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh apart from the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu.

The State government, during the budget session of the Assembly in March this year, provided figures of IMFL and countrymade liquor recovered in the last two years. IMFL worth ₹215.62 crore (1.06 crore bottles) and ₹4.33 crore (19.34 lakh litres) countrymade liquor have been recovered from across the State.

A retired IPS officer contends that prohibition in Gujarat is a win-win situation for all stakeholders except the people of the State. “Police can make money all the way from a constable to an SP, IG and above; a major slice of the booty is shared with politicians too,” he said, explaining the deeply entrenched interests at play.

Another major reason, said a serving IPS officer, is that the government in power can potentially use the law to target political opponents. “It’s a deadly law. It can be used against opponents — the latest case being that of Isudan Gadhvi,” the officer said, referring to the senior Gujarat AAP leader’s booking under the Prohibition Act in January.

Lens on the law

In 2018 and 2019, several petitions were filed in the Gujarat High Court by residents of Vadodara and Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar challenging the State’s prohibition law.

The petitioners have sought to challenge the law on the ground of privacy contending that any invasion by the State in an individual’s right to choice of food and beverage amounts to an unreasonable restriction and violates the right to privacy. The petitioners have challenged the constitutional validity of various sections of the Gujarat Prohibition Act, 1949, including Sections 12 and 13 (total prohibition on manufacture, purchase, import, transportation, export, sale, possession, use and consumption of liquor) and sought them to be declared as ultra vires Article 246 of the Constitution.

“With expanding interpretation of the right to life, personal liberty and privacy, as contained in Article 21 of the Constitution, a citizen has a right to choose how he lives, so long as he is not a nuisance to the society. The state cannot dictate what he will eat and what he will drink,” stated one of the petitions.

In August 2021, the Division Bench of the High Court admitted the petitions and agreed to hear them on merits despite the State government questioning their maintainability. The petitions were to be heard from October 2021 by the Division Bench but the elevation of the then Chief Justice Vikram Nath, who was part of the Bench, to the Supreme Court put the issue on the back burner.

While the petitions await hearing and a possible reconstitution of the Division Bench, several noted social activists and social workers have also filed two separate civil applications supporting the continued imposition of prohibition in the State.

The class dynamic

The dynamics of prohibition are a function of both geography and class.

On the one hand is the hooch or spurious liquor that is brewed locally and supplied in plastic pouches, catering to those at the bottom of the pyramid in villages and urban areas. The hooch is often prone to adulteration and results in human tragedies such as the one that unfolded on July 25.

On the other is a sprawling and extremely efficient network of bootleggers and liquor mafias ostensibly operating underground but able to deliver high-end IMFL and imported brands to the middle- and upper-middle-class drinkers’ home in any part of the State.

Moreover, the State has issued permits on health grounds to more than 50,000 people who can consume stipulated quantities of alcohol to be purchased from licensed liquor shops operating from select five-star hotels and resorts. Most of those holding such permits are upper-middle-class residents of cities such as Ahmedabad, Surat, Vadodara and Rajkot. The anti-prohibition petitions in High Court flag this skewed scenario where the State government has allowed a class of permit holders, including tourists, to consume alcohol while denying others access.

A resident of any posh locality in Ahmedabad can order alcohol and have it delivered at home within a few hours. A resident from the city’s western parts, who regularly sources premium liquor from his bootlegger, said that with the right contacts, a bottle is just a call away. “It’s like ordering food on Swiggy or Zomato.”

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