April 13, 1998

As prohibition ends in Haryana, Senior Editor Sudeep Chakravarti travels through a state still lurching from its effects.

Gold. As bracelets on wrists, in chains around necks, chunky pens in shirt pockets, enough fat baubles on fingers to give self-respecting sheikhs a complex. And Kulwant Singh & Co, a six-member consortium of liquor barons, is planning to add to their riches.

They do. The bid for vends in Gurgaon starts at Rs 48 crore and ends a minute later at Rs 51 crore, the highest for a territory in an auction, signal that booze is back with a bang in Haryana. Messers Singh, Kulwant and Manjit, and Messers Jaiswal, Jawaharlal, Badri Prasad, Har Prasad and Ramji, get up as one -- cumulative weight approaching a medium-sized army truck -- and leave the steaming tent at the excise commissioner's office in Ambala, which has at least 5,000 noisy bidders and onlookers. Outside, it's like a fairground: cars, fruit-sellers and chatwallahs.

Drained with the effort, they sip Coke and Limca as attendants and suddenly grovelling excise officials swarm around them. They look pretty deadbeat for successful marauders from Uttar Pradesh who have picked up the rights to sell liquor in two of the most profitable areas of Haryana; they bought Faridabad for Rs 34 crore. Annual profits can be double or more the bid price. "Come on, gentlemen," I josh, trying to avoid the reflection of the sun off Kulwant's gold Rolex. "Time to party. Where's the champagne?"

"You want the police to catch us?" guffaws Manjit, as the others rumble gleefully like Jabba the Hut, "Tonight we party. Coming?"

Sorry, got to go. It's March 31, 1998. Haryana will party past midnight. The rural and the poor because they can drink legally. Their families because this lot can drink safely, if easily. And city slickers in Karnal, Ambala, and Sonepat, the plush developments in Gurgaon and the industrial belt of Faridabad, who drink as a culture, as entertainment and because they are with it. And I want to be there.

Since Chief Minister Bansi Lal cracked down with prohibition 21 months ago, he has lost the state money -- about Rs 1,200 crore in excise revenue. He also lost the support of the very people -- farmers and the poor -- he rode to power on. Raising water and electricity bills and bus fares took care of that. The art of how not to enforce prohibition in a dry state surrounded by five wet ones took care of the rest. His party alliance got slammed in the Lok Sabha polls, after which the decision to reverse prohibition was taken. And the buzz is that prohibition or permission, he may lose the next assembly elections. Even with the renewed flow of funds: the licence fee for all vends fetched Rs 491 crore, with more to come through excise collections. As a forum of tipplers of Kalyat town in Kaithal district mailed a 30-m-long thank you note to Bansi Lal, another forum in Rohtak burnt his effigy, for lifting prohibition. April 1. All Fool's Day. The joke seems to be on him.

Strangely, party-time is the day before. It will take a couple of days before vends are dressed up, more for supplies to pour in, even more before restaurants get permits to serve alcohol, from the basic Deluxe dhaba at Ambala (famous for its hen logo and catch-line "Meet Me Anywhere But Eat Me Here) to the swank Fireball discotheque near Gurgaon. Meanwhile, at Jharmari, barely half a kilometre across the border in Punjab towards Chandigarh, Harjeet Singh and Paramvir Chauhan drink themselves silly at a small dhaba next to a liquor shop, knowing that from the next day, they, like the 30-odd out-of-their-mind drinkers, won't be back.

Gladly. Harjeet, who owns three meat shops, blew a lot of what he earned commuting, drinking, and to theft -- once he lost his scooter and numerous times his day's earnings as he lay comatose on the grass outside, much like the occupants of a dozen or so cars, scooters and tractors, all with Haryana number plates. Harjeet and Paramvir, an officer in Haryana's Irrigation Department, talk turkey. His wife will be happier now, says Harjeet, he can drink at home as before, it's cheaper, safer and within limits. And Paramvir recounts something that is always at the core of a ban, proven recently in Andhra Pradesh and continually in Gujarat: if you are prevented from doing something, you will do everything to do it. And more.

"I used to drink once in a while. Now I drink half a bottle a day." Paramvir starts weeping. "We made children smuggle for us. We went that low." He promises to be back to drinking occasionally from Day One, which the wits from Kaithal suggested to the chief minister be called Liquor Day. "Now it will be better, won't it?" sniffles Paramvir, "What do you think?"

Yes, sure, I mumble -- what else can I say? -- and look around the filthy eatery. The most prominent noise is belligerent, back-slapping conversation -- "Drink, mother@$*#&*! Masti karo, have fun!" -- and the most prominent sign somewhat more sobering: "Those who vomit will be fined Rs 20". Those who did, and couldn't pay up got 20 with a shoe or whatever was handy. Delinquent in Haryana, disciplined in Punjab, about as staggering a bit of irony as any.

Who knows what was right or wrong in the end, I wonder as we drive past golden wheat harvests on the bone-jarring road from Kaithal to Rohtak, in a mainly political exercise that has been stood on its head? Bansi Lal hasn't been hit harder, or been embarrassed more, in years. In some parts of Haryana, the code for a full bottle was Bansi Lal, for a half, it was Surender Singh, his son, one of the few from the political combine of the bjp and Bansi Lal's Haryana Vikas Party who was elected to the Lok Sabha this time on account of his pro-booze plank.

That's just part of the story. On the first day of prohibition on July 1, 1996, a Haryana police sub-inspector was arrested and suspended for disturbing public peace -- drunk. Two others drove down to Andhra Pradesh, then "dry", to fit a Tata Sierra meant for Bansi Lal with electronic jammers to counter remote-controlled explosives. They set off something else: both were caught at a random police check carrying alcohol. On August 2 that year, a day before Bansi Lal's "the state will enter a new era of happiness" speech in Rohtak, seven people died and 35 were seriously injured drinking killer hooch, often little more than a rough mixture of molasses, tree bark, water and urea to quicken the fermentation process.

Other gems: women pretending to be pregnant, a ploy to hide pouches of country liquor brought in from neighbouring Uttar Pradesh, men wearing padded jackets in the middle of summer, and children carrying booze in their schoolbags. Garbage collectors would snitch to the police when they saw empty bottles in the bag -- and often, share the booty with the police. The milkman would bring, along with the milk, liquor sometimes spiked with medicine to make buffaloes give more milk. The kick almost killed him one night, says Chander Prakash, "Desperate, I still drank."

So he did, and did so many others that the police record reads total number of persons arrested: 1,08,776. Cases registered: 98,699. Bailable offences: 38,818. Non-bailable offences (more than two bottles of liquor or three bottles of beer): 59,881. Vehicles impounded -- even if the person driving was bailed out, the vehicle was impounded -- including Haryana road transport buses: 7,093.

So far, there is no decision to drop charges. There are no orders from the brass, says Satbir Singh, station house officer at Faridabad N.I.T. police station, about what to do with those who have cases against them, the impounded cars -- his backyard has a few -- or the confiscated liquor. All he knows is that he will paint over the letter box near his office, identical to scores of others elsewhere, which was a snitch-box: people could come and leave anonymous tips. Now, it will become a general complaints box. All across Haryana, hoardings that blared Sharab Mukt Haryana (Liquor Free Haryana) have come down, repainted with "Don't Drink and Drive" slogans. One, near the Punjab border near Ambala, trumpets a Rs 2,400 crore World Bank loan for power.

The shift is less smooth elsewhere. Keorak, a dirt-poor village with a population of 20,000 -- "but 10,000 votes," as village elder Hari Singh stresses, used this time against Bansi Lal -- scored in 1995 for two reasons. It elected its first female sarpanch, or chief, Satya Devi. And she immediately set about campaigning for prohibition, a call that was taken up by other villages. "I was upset then," says the tough-talking lady, "And I'm even more upset now." She and others like her harped that village folk were wasting away with easy, cheap availability of liquor, with little money left over for the family, and he was quick to spot an electoral opportunity: prohibition. He won, and then within weeks, it all went to pieces.

In Keorak, "every 10th house had an illegal still", says Satya Devi. "We were worse off than before, and we even turned our children into thieves." She's equally bitter when she and a knot of elders discuss a local constable who has bought himself a house, another who bought 15 shops at one shot. And the money, about Rs 10 crore, that is estimated to have been spent in adjoining Patiala district of Punjab by people from Kaithal. "Drink," she cynically tells the gathering, "at least you won't drink rubbish, become thieves, at least the money will stay in Haryana."

Have you learnt your lesson, I ask her. She fixes me with a glare like the one another lady fixed me in Lakhan Majra, a few hours drive away, as she passed by a newly opened liquor shop clutching her baby. Are you happy, I had asked that lady, at least this way you know it's safe? She looked at a teenage boy coming out of the shop, opening the cap of his half bottle of country liquor as grown men laughed and pointed at him. "Happy?" she pinned me with a contemptuous look. "You dress like a sahib, but you talk like an idiot."

There's always that. Me and Bansi Lal, an unlikely brotherhood.

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