There are two reasons for this change of heart. First, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar made a promise, while campaigning for the Assembly elections, to ban the sale of liquor if he were to be returned to power. This resonated with women voters whose turnout went up perceptibly in these elections. There are many reasons for the massive victory of the Grand Alliance but the prohibition promise was an important one.
The issue is, do you take election promises seriously? Prime Minister Narendra Modi famously promised to bring back the black money salted away abroad which would put lakhs into every citizen's bank account. Then, with breathtaking casualness, it was explained after the elections that the promise was made in a manner of speaking and should not be taken literally. Are elections promises made to be broken and democracy works nevertheless? Instead, should election promises, at least the important ones, be made after careful thought and every attempt made after coming to power to keep them? If you give up after an honest effort to live by the promise that does not work then it can at least be said that your intentions were honourable.
Second, my change of heart has a professional pathway. In recent months I have been researching the operations of the microfinance industry and this has brought me into direct contact with the working poor in semi-urban areas. What stands out in particular is the meetings with women borrowers and the learnings from them.
While interacting with such a group near Bengaluru, on a sudden fancy I asked the 20-odd women what they thought of Mr Kumar's promise on prohibition and would they support a candidate in the state who made such a promise? Their reply stunned me. All of them, without exception, raised their hands to say their vote would go to such a person. Group interaction till then had been quite halting. Some of them were in hijab, with the flap before the face thrown back, and most were not used to talking to men in an equal give and take. But the somewhat reserved group suddenly became quite animated and some began to talk all at once. The issue was real and it mattered to them.
After the meeting I realised that while I had been intellectually aware that most women were against drinking, particularly as you went down the social ladder, I had no idea of the depth of feeling it aroused. They saw in drinking by men a threat to the survival of family life and some gave brief examples of what happened around them.
At a similar meeting soon after in the outskirts of Kolkata, I repeated the same question to a group of women who ranged from piece-goods workers to housemaids. Their response was identical. As this time I heard the women's stories without losing anything in translation, the impact was stronger. Having come this far, I decided to repeat the question next at a meeting with women borrowers in the outskirts of Delhi and the response was the same. The sentiment stretches across the country, irrespective of region or language.
I have no hesitation in admitting that a lifetime as a scribe spent mostly interacting with corporates had kept me away from such a reality. I suspect many in the business media and their readers will be in a similar position.
But the issue still remains: does prohibition work and if gone through with does it do more harm than good? The experience so far is that it does not and if it had, prohibition would not have been confined to less than a handful of states. There are also numerous instances of illicit liquor tragedies in prohibition-bound states though these take places elsewhere also.
There is no doubt that the only long-term solution is a successful temperance movement. But can you wait that long and predicate administrative action on a social movement whose success, even in the long term, currently looks remote? What does work is making it a little difficult to buy liquor. Also targeting. The urban middle class and the well-off can take care of themselves. It is the poor who are vulnerable.
The Bihar government appears to understand this and has taken a decision to end the sale of unbranded excise or country liquor and restrict sale of branded (IMFL) products to urban areas from only a few government shops. I can recall how distasteful it was to have to shove and push to buy a bottle in Delhi in the early seventies after being used to doing the same without fuss in Kolkata. I can also recall how distasteful I found the sight of autorickshaw drivers in Bengaluru stopping to down a peg straight off the counter at off-licence stores, never mind the rules, fairly early in the day. We all know prohibition does not work but we have not reached the end of administrative ingenuity. If voters want it vehemently, then it is incumbent upon us to give it a try and innovate to evolve a model that works.