Jagan Mohan Reddy, the 46 year old Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh who is hell-bent to destroy the socio-economic life of the people of the state has decided to completely ban alcohol in the state. Andhra Pradesh will be the fifth state after Gujarat, Mizoram, Bihar and Nagaland to put a prohibition on the sale and consumption of alcohol.
Driven with ‘Christian’ zeal to control the life of the people, Reddy is delivering one blow after another to the people of the state. His ultimate aim seems to make Andhra a Christian theological state, with English as medium of instruction in government schools, financial support to Christian brides and monthly remuneration for pastors and Imams from government coffers, he has taken many steps in the direction.
The government has planned to put a complete ban on alcohol consumption by 2024. The state will have a new liquor policy by January next year, which will have a comprehensive blueprint to ban alcohol, in a phased manner.
This is the second time the state is banning alcohol consumption. The first ban was put by legendary Andhra politician- NTR, who placed a ban in 1995, which his son in law Chandrababu Naidu removed in April 1997.
The Andhra government has already taken over the retail sales of alcohol and reduced the number of vends from 4,380 to 3,500. The government has also cancelled the license of many bars and restaurants and put various restrictions on the existing ones. Due to the steps by the government, the sale of liquor declined by 18 per cent since last May, when Reddy government came to power.
“We have proposed stringent punishments for bars flouting rules-fines up to thrice the license fee and six months in jail,” says deputy Chief Minister and Minister for prohibition and excise, K. Narayana Swamy.
With the prohibition on liquor, Andhra government is suffering massive loss in excise revenues. The total excise collection in FY 18 was 5,789 crore rupees and this has been reduced to 3,326 crore rupees in the first 9 months of this calendar year.
This will prove massive blow to the financial health of the state, which is already under the huge burden of 2.58 lakh crore rupees, which results in interest burden of 20,000 crore rupees per year. With the freebies announced to almost every section of the society, and revenues going doing due to stupid moves like liquor prohibition, the state will be pushed towards financial bankruptcy.
Being Indians, it is important for us to understand the cultural ethos of our country which never ever believed in the culture of ban, we can’t find a single sentence in any of the epics/puranas which suggests a ban like action.
This is because in India, we believe it is the right of one to live his/her life according to his /her idea of what is right. This idea of right is not written in any holy book but it is one’s own realization of what is right and what is wrong.
Consumption of alcohol is one’s personal choice, it is similar to consuming meat, for which we had witnessed so much of uproar last few months.
Moreover, Prohibition does not kill the craving for alcohol, it only increases its demand and creates a whole underground economy that caters to providing it. And since people with legal means do not get into this, who does? The mafia. Not just the gangsters, but also the bureaucratic mafia. Prohibition becomes yet another tool for the corrupt to inflate their coffers and further push the society into the abyss.
Consider the biggest example that served how futile this measure is, i.e., the prohibition era in US (1920-33). For these thirteen years, the government just did not stop at banning the distillation, consumption and sale of alcohol; it straightaway resorted to poisoning the seized stocks and releasing them again to terrify the public to abandon it. It resulted in over 10000 deaths during the period of prohibition and this figure is for deaths due to consumption and not in the various deaths due to gang war, shootouts with legal authorities involved due to bootlegging activities.
In India too, no amount of prohibition enforcement has been able to deter the consumption of alcohol. Gujarat, which has had it imposed since its formation, today remains the largest black market for alcohol, in spite of death penalty for country liquor brewing [Bombay Prohibition (Gujarat Amendment) Bill, 2009). Smuggling and illicit trade of alcohol are very common and anything can be bought if the right contacts are in place.”Folder” is what is referred to in colloquial lingo, for the bootlegger delivering liquor at demand. If Chicago had Al Capone as a gift during the prohibition era, Ahmedabad had Abdul Latif. Prohibition doesn’t give you model citizens, it gives you a parallel economy and a wannabe gangster in every locality.