[Like so many disciples of Carry Nation, the temperance advocate who took a hatchet to United States saloons at the turn of the 20th century, village women are taking matters into their own hands, enforcing a prohibition law in Bihar, one of India’s poorest, most agrarian states.]
By Geeta Anand
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Women
in India’s Bihar State marching to the cornfield where they had discovered
illegal
moonshine. Credit Atul Loke for The New York Times
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BANDOL,
India — Dozens of women
brandishing brooms swooped down on a straw house in this village on a recent
Saturday, sending the owner fleeing through a rice field as they seized buckets
of fruit juice being fermented into a cheap liquor.
An hour’s drive away, a group of village
women followed the scent of alcohol into a cornfield to find vats of moonshine
dug into the ground, which they guarded for several hours until the police
arrived.
Like so many disciples of Carry Nation, the
temperance advocate who took a hatchet to United States saloons at the turn of
the 20th century, village women are taking matters into their own hands,
enforcing a prohibition law in Bihar, one of India’s poorest, most agrarian
states.
Though per capita income is less than $600 a
year, many if not most men used to routinely spend much of their money on
alcohol, further impoverishing their families.
“It was the acceptable norm to be drunk,”
said Raj Kumar Prasad, the chief of the Halsi police station, which oversees 50
villages, including Bandol.
But that has changed, the authorities and
villagers say, adding that the law imposing severe penalties for the sale and
consumption of alcohol seems to have worked remarkably well. The crime rate has
fallen sharply, government figures show, and spending on things like motorbikes
and appliances has risen significantly. And almost everyone credits the
vigilance of the women of Bihar for most of the law’s success.
It all began nearly two years ago, when
Bihar’s chief minister, Nitish Kumar, was in the fight of his political life
against the Bharatiya Janata Party, the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Mr. Kumar had just addressed a meeting at a convention hall in July when a
woman approached the microphone.
“Brother, ban alcohol,” she said.
For reasons he still cannot quite explain,
Mr. Kumar said, he pledged, “If I get elected, I will ban alcohol.”
Those words flew onto the front pages of the
country’s newspapers, and there was no turning back. The day after he was
re-elected, in an overwhelming defeat of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Mr. Kumar
began drawing up a draconian law imposing maximum sentences of seven years for
drinking alcohol and life in prison for making it.
There were no exceptions for medical
conditions or tourist hotels — reasons that prohibition had failed elsewhere,
he said.
The measure took effect last April. Mr. Kumar
had planned to enact the law in stages, beginning in rural areas. But
protesters prevented liquor stores from opening in the state capital, Patna,
even though they were still legal under the first stage of the ban.
The public — particularly women — was
energized. Between 200 and 300 complaints a day came in to police hotlines and
email accounts, said Alok Raj, who, as the additional director general of
police, took the lead in enforcing the law.
Women had long complained that alcohol was
impoverishing their families, said Mr. Kumar, 66. The results in the year since
the measure has been in effect bear those grievances out.
Murders and gang robberies are down almost 20
percent from a year earlier, and riots by 13 percent. Fatal traffic accidents
fell by 10 percent.
At the same time, household spending has
risen, with milk sales up more than 10 percent and cheese sales growing by 200
percent six months after the ban. Sales of two-wheeled vehicles rose more than
30 percent, while sales of electrical appliances rose by 50 percent. Brick
houses are rising in villages where mud huts used to predominate.
Not everyone is happy. More than 42,000
people have been arrested under the new law and are awaiting trial. The people
who made a living turning rice and fruit juice into alcoholic drinks — often
the poorest, lowest-caste residents — have been pushed into lower-paying jobs
as day laborers. Night life in Patna has been subdued, as many restaurants that
used to serve alcohol have closed, their revenue down by as much as 50 percent.
“The quantum of punishment is too high,” said
Jitan Ram Manjhi, a former chief minister of Bihar. “This is unfair.” He
supports prohibition but noted that even armed robbery carried a lower
sentence.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Prasad, the chief
of the Halsi police station, sat at a weathered desk outside his headquarters.
A bottle of whiskey stood on the table in front of him as he wrote up a report
in Hindi.
That morning, his officers, acting on a tip,
had stopped a small white sedan coming from a neighboring state. Concealed in
the doors and other hiding places were 40 bottles of whiskey — evidence, he
said, that some alcohol will always be smuggled into Bihar from neighboring
states where it is legal.
Sixty percent of the tips he receives are
from women, with many even reporting that relatives and neighbors are drinking,
selling or making alcohol, Mr. Prasad said.
“It’s come into women’s minds, this idea to
stop drinking,” he said. “That’s made a big difference.”
In January last year, before the prohibition
law was enacted, the women of Bandol made their first collective effort at
stamping out alcohol. About 100 descended on a mud hut where liquor was being
sold, forcing it to close and dragging the proprietor off to the police
station.
Next, groups of women began showing up at the
homes of the biggest drinkers in the village, demanding them to stop.
One of the first was Omprakash Ram
Chandrawanshi, 35. “Behave, or we’ll get tough,” they told him, recalled his
wife, Soni Devi Chandrawanshi. They shouted, “Just like we took that store
owner into the police, we’ll take you in.”
Ms. Chandrawanshi said her husband had sat
quietly, his head lowered, as the women berated him. “I think he thought, ‘If
they did that to the store owner, they’ll do it to me,’” she said.
Mr. Chandrawanshi, a lean man sitting in a plastic
chair outside the room he shares with his wife and three children, said the
group had scared him out of a habit that had made him miserable.
“If I earned 500 rupees, I would spend 200 on
alcohol,” he said. He earns the equivalent of about $200 a month as a driver,
he said, but “I often wouldn’t bring any money home.”
Now, his family is able not only to buy more
food, but also to pay for tutorials to help the children in school, he said,
and it has been able to expand the brick house shared by the extended family.
So taken were Mr. Chandrawanshi and several
reformed drinkers with a new, sober life that they have joined the women’s
vigilante group in harassing and identifying illegal alcohol operations.
They also answered the call of their chief
minister to show their support for the alcohol ban by standing together in a
human chain across the state. More than 30 million Biharis, about a quarter of
the population, joined hands along 7,000 miles of roadway one day in January,
local news media outlets reported.
Mr. Kumar’s initiative is so popular among
the public that leaders of other states are taking notice. Delegations of state
legislators have visited in recent months to study the reasons for Bihar’s
success.
The chief minister of nearby Madhya Pradesh
State recently announced that he would phase in prohibition. On March 31, the
Supreme Court of India reaffirmed its ban on alcohol sales near the nation’s
highways to try to reduce drunken driving.
The secret in Bihar is a ferocious law
propelled by a relentless social and political campaign that resonates
powerfully with women, Mr. Kumar said. “Only when you have the women behind you
can you succeed,” he said.
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.