NEW DELHI // Opposition parties in Tamil Nadu are banding together to demand a ban on liquor sales in the Indian state where alcoholism is widespread, staking out campaign positions ahead of regional elections next May.
If prohibition is imposed, however, then the state government will face a dire financial problem: liquor sales provide the Tamil Nadu government with more than 20 per cent of its revenues.
Over the past week, political protests demanding prohibition have grown increasingly strident and violent. Last week, in the town of Marthandam, a protester who had scaled a telephone tower in front of a liquor shop died of heart failure.
A group of parties then called for a dawn-to-dusk shutdown of alcohol stores across the state on Tuesday that saw students from a Chennai college stone a liquor shop near their campus, shouting pro-prohibition slogans. Late that night, an employee of a liquor store in the town of Attur died in a blaze after a petrol bomb was thrown into the building.
Prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) were among those coordinating the shutdown.
Meanwhile, Tamil Nadu’s main opposition party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), has announced its own statewide protest, set for August 10.
M Karunanidhi, the 91-year-old head of the DMK, announced in late July that his party would enforce prohibition if elected to power next year.
“The drinking habit has not only affected men but also women and small children,” he said. “This has brought to focus the need for prohibition.”
A 2014 study by students and faculty at a medical college in the Tamil Nadu city of Kanchipuram, found that 35.7 per cent of male respondents exhibited symptoms of chronic alcoholism.
The changes in Tamil Nadu’s alcohol consumption patterns over the last 20 years, the authors wrote, “have raised concerns about public health and social consequences”.
However, Tamil Nadu’s ruling party, the All India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), has rejected its rivals’ demands for banning alcohol, attributing them to electoral opportunism.
“The agitation by the opposition parties ... is only for gaining political mileage out of the prohibition issue,” Natham Viswanathan, the state’s electricity minister and an AIADMK official, told the Press Trust of India on Monday.
The consumption of liquor is a social rather than political issue, Mr Viswanathan added. “The state government is creating awareness on the impacts of liquor through campaigns and conferences.”
Alcohol policy varies within India from state to state. Officially, the states of Nagaland, Gujarat and Manipur are “dry”, because the sale and consumption of all alcohol is prohibited. Last year, Kerala announced a phased move towards prohibition, shutting down several bars and allowing only five-star hotels to sell hard liquor.
But many get around these restrictions by instead buying and selling unregulated liquor – what is often known as “country liquor” in India. In 2014, 1,699 people died across the country from the consumption of such alcohol, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, a 1,202 increase on the previous year. At present, no research has been carried out to assess the prevalence of alcoholism nationwide.
In Tamil Nadu, the state’s relationship with liquor sales is a complex one, and involves a long and convoluted history.
Alcohol sales and consumption were banned in the state from 1937 until 1971, when Mr Karunanidhi – who was then chief minister – revoked prohibition. In 1974, however, he reintroduced it again.
Liquor sales were permitted again by an AIADMK government between 1981 and 1988, and then again by the DMK in 1990. But as deaths and hospitalisations due to “country liquor” grew in the subsequent decade, an AIADMK government in 2003 – headed then, as it is now, by chief minister J Jayalalithaa – gave the state a full monopoly on alcohol sales.
No private wholesalers or retailers of alcohol exist in Tamil Nadu today. Instead, all sales are conducted by the Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (Tasmac), through its network of nearly 7,000 shops. In the financial year 2014-15, alcohol sales earned the Tamil Nadu government revenues of nearly 262 billion rupees (Dh15.1bn), up from 73 billion rupees a decade ago.
The state earns more than 20 per cent of its revenues from Tasmac sales.
For this reason, one state government official said, “It’s impossible to think about doing away with alcohol sales. Where will the money come from? How will we pay for our other schemes and our expenditures?”
The Tamil Nadu government heavily subsidises electricity and food. In 2013, it began to open low-cost canteens across the state, where poor customers can get a meal for as little as five rupees. Several other subsidised products, services and retail centres – pharmacies, cinema theatres, salt and mineral water – have also been inaugurated.
All of these schemes are operated and funded by the state government in a bid to win and maintain the loyalty of voters in Tamil Nadu, which is a relatively wealthy state, but where such subsidies far outstrip those offered by other regional governments.
As a result, "the state's budget is in bad financial shape", Peer Mohamed, a Chennai-based political analyst, told The National. "Karunanidhi had said that he had lifted prohibition in 1971 because the state needed money. Well, it's the same situation now."
The share of the federal government’s revenues allotted to Tamil Nadu has dipped as well, Mr Mohamed said, based on decisions made by India’s planning commission. This year, Tamil Nadu received roughly 250 billion rupees, down by 10 billion from last year.
At the same time, however, Tamil Nadu has an undeniable problem of alcoholism.
The effects of such alcoholism – ill health and domestic violence in particular – are especially prevalent in the economically disadvantaged sections of society.
“The demand for prohibition right now is a political one,” Mr Mohamed said, but it is finding resonance among families with members who are alcoholics.
“Alcohol really has caused havoc among the poor.”
SSubramanian@thenational.ae