BIHAR: KICKING A HARD HABIT
The state’s battle to enforce prohibition faces ever-increasing odds
It was midnight on February 6 and the police in East Champaran district had intercepted a speeding Honda City carrying 23 cartons of illicit liquor. An accompanying vehicle managed to speed away, crushing a police constable to death in the process. Dinesh Kumar Sinha was the second policeman killed by liquor smugglers in the past two months. Earlier, on November 27, 2017, police sergeant Anil Kumar Singh was killed and Manoj Kumar Singh, SHO of the Sarairanjan station, sustained gunshot injuries in an encounter with smugglers in Samastipur district, north of Patna. And this February 14, a bootlegger, Munna Nonia, was shot by police while sneaking into Katihar district with a consignment of alcohol.
Since April 2016, when Chief Minister Nitish Kumar imposed total prohibition in Bihar, the state police and excise departments have been struggling to cope with the deluge. There has been some success—some 2.25 million liquor bottles valued at over Rs 250 crore have been seized. And despite being stretched for resources, officials have reportedly conducted a whopping 600,000 raids and arrested some 108,000 individuals in the past 22 months. That’s an almost unbelievable 900 raids and 161 arrests every single day! But it’s clearly not enough.
Critics say it’s an exercise in futility, and it’s costing Bihar. In 201516, the year before prohibition, the state government got Rs 3,981 crore in excise revenues, almost 13 per cent of Bihar’s total an
nual revenue of Rs 30,875 crore. Nitish, however, points to the benefits. “Forget the revenue loss, prohibition has brought in a positive social change, besides improving the overall health and economic status of the poor. That’s our main motto,” he says. Perhaps he’s onto something. The prohibition policy has won him a huge following, particularly among women.
But Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad Yadav insists that prohibition is a failure. “Those who can afford it, get it at their doorstep. Those who can’t, turn to spurious liquor,” he says. Lalu’s claims too bear some truth. Just some months back, in October 2017, four people died from consuming spurious liquor in Rohtas district.
Police officials in the districts admit that prohibition has engendered a thriving black market. “The foot soldiers employed to smuggle liquor are paid Rs 40,000 to 50,000 a month. And they’re willing to risk anything, even kill a policeman,” says a superintendent of police. And this is despite Bihar’s prohibition laws prescribing the death penalty for offenders.
It’s clearly an impossible challenge. The understaffed police and excise department must deal with smugglers coming from virtually every direction. Bihar not only shares borders with UP, Jharkhand and West Bengal, where liquor is legal, but also has a highly porous, 1,751 km frontier with Nepal in the north.
And there are predictably many who are more than willing to pay for the illicit liquor. The Annual Health Survey (AHS) 20102011 states that 9.5 per cent of all Biharis, some 4.4 million, were alcoholics. Juxtaposed with the mere 10,000 footfalls at the deaddiction clinics set up after April 2016, it shows that not too many Biharis have kicked the habit.
Consider this: just last month (January) police detained Nishikant, a deputy collector in Muzaffarpur district, in an inebriated state. In November, two government employees were arrested for drinking in their office in East Champaran. And in a similar instance, four police constables were caught drinking inside a police post in Bhagalpur.
But Nitish is intent on changing things. Having created the post of IGP (inspector general of police), Prohibition, plans are now afoot to add an intelligence wing with some 250 personnel to keep an eye on black sheep within the state administration. But will the new office, equipped with all the new surveillance gadgetry, be able to stem the flow of liquor into Bihar?
108,000 ARRESTS IN THE PAST 22 MONTHS HAVE CLEARLY NOT BEEN ENOUGH