Road to prohibition full of U-turns

Bansi Lal, former chief minister of Haryana, was a spartan and inflexible politician. He formed the Haryana Vikas Party after parting ways from the Congress and, in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), won the 1996 Lok Sabha and assembly elections in the state. He won on the promise of making it illegal to buy, sell, consume or produce alcohol in the state if elected.

Bansi Lal made good his promise within six months of forming the government, even naming a minister forprohibition in his Cabinet. And, yet, when the minister, Ganeshi Lal, stepped into his office in March 1998 and announced with a smile, "Aaj se sharab bandi khatam (Prohibition ends from today)," the people gathered there burst into applause.

Prohibition lasted 21 months. It cost the state government Rs 1,300 crore in excise revenue. For years after that, the administration grappled with nearly 100,000 alcohol-related cases in courts, a stock of 1.3 million seized bottles, and 16 hooch accidents, which left 60 dead.

When he announced prohibition, Bansi Lal declared: "I would rather cut grass for a livelihood than lift prohibition." After succumbing to pressure from alliance partners and others, and lifting prohibition, he remarked: "When the people don't want prohibition any longer, sacrificing a hugeexcise revenue is meaningless."

Nor was Bansi Lal the first to do a U-turn on a policy that is sensitive for its political, economic and administrative ramifications. In 1990, the women of Dubbagunta, a small village in Andhra Pradesh's Nellore district, began an anti-arrack agitation. The put pressure on men to swear that they would stop drinking, physically restrained habitual drinkers, attacked liquor shops and godowns and fought with the police, liquor mafia and those who frequented liquor shops.Read More.