though i was never a supporter of gandhiji or his teachings, i did visit his home-town porbander, when i had been to gujarat for the wedding of a friend of mine. i had reached two days in advance, and so, went round the place with another frined of ours.
my friend - the bridegroom, was from a huge guju joint-family that dabbled in well...almost everything. they had their hands in the manufacture of pump-sets to shell-caps for the para-military forces. he was a regular at our weekly booze nights in banjara hills, hyderabad. a peculiar thing about his habit was that he used to become deeply emotional after each peg of his favourite rum, old monks. he starts to cry on becoming tipsy (or tully). i have experienced laziness when a pint of beer makes me ballooned up in the bladders, so much that, i am forced to go for a pee. in this guy's case, he used to cry out the rum and soda. he used to bawl about his failed relations and how he would never be able to run the family business efficiently because of his waywardness. but he was a person who played for the gallery (like sehwag) rather than making records for himself (like tendulkar he he). he used to spend proficiently for his friends. he had a nice vocabulary about the drinks and its various mixes.
so, when i was invited for his wedding, i expected nothing short of champagne and caviar. from cochin, i boarded the train for ahmedabad. the journey was nice. it was when i landed at the railway station that i learned, rather shocked to learn that, gujarat is a state where 'prohibition' is in. prohibition is the state policy of legal ban on alcoholic products, owing to being the birth-state of the father of the nation, gandhiji. but it was at the bachelor party that i howled in relief when i realised that the law was a joke.
kerala, along-with punjab held the record sales for selling liquor. in cochin, i had to arrive at the supplies by 7 in the evening, stand in a long queue and the bottles would be handed over in black polythene bags by 9. a good 2 hours would be spend reading the labels and planning out good mixtures inside the head. i had to hold the bottles safely in the pillion seat while the two-wheeler would speed past the streets to avoid being noticed by anyone. ironically, in the alcohol-prohibited state of gujarat, i just had to sit at home and...abracadabra... the bottle is in front of me. the supply chain is well organised and the neighbourhood bootlegger supplies the request at home. nobody drinks publicly but huge parties serving quality brands are organised behind the doors. the policemen look the other way because a large part of their income is from this business. on the weekends there is massive traffic on the roads to neighbouring mount abu, diu and daman. being out of gujarat, revellers can drink openly strewing the roads with empty bottles and generally making a nuisance of themselves. by keeping up the farce of prohibition, gujarat loses in annual revenues an estimated 2,500 crore or more that could have been charged by way of excise duty, but the state government cannot gather courage to do away totally with prohibition.
gandhiji believed that free flow of liquor encourages the poor and others to drink excessively resulting in the sapping of their health, making them incapable of working; they end up neglecting their families. but the point to note is that it is the poor who are affected the most by prohibition. the gandhians of gujarat think that the streets of gujarat are immune from the sort of crime seen in other places because of prohibition. lifting prohibition will be akin to opening the gates of a dam, they argue.
the recent hooch tragedy didnt shock me. over 130 people died in ahmedabad after consuming illicit hooch. most of the people who have died are poor and according to reports, over 80 per cent of them are dalits or gandhiji's so-called harijans. incidentally the epicentre of the tragedy is in chief minister narendra modi’s very own maninagar area of ahmedabad.
why is narendra modi unable to muster the courage to lift this farce of a law that has been part of state policy in gandhi-land for the last 50 years. he does not lift prohibition not because he is in awe of gandhian thinking or any care for the people as projected in his public stunts. his reluctance stems from the fact that he lacks boldness and vision which is....contrary to his general image.
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