Dodging prohibition laws
By Manohar Malgonkar

BUT when it comes to slaughter/We’ll do our work on water, was a part of the battlefield burst of praise for that Limpin’ lump of brick-dust, Gunga Din, on the part of Rudyard Kipling’s idealised British Tommy.

Oh, well; there are political puritans, here and elsewhere who, even though they’re not in the business of slaughter, take it upon themselves to make laws to compel all citizens to do their work on water — water or, some ‘soft’, meaning non-alcoholic, drink.

They bring in prohibition.

And who can quarrel with the broad aims of total prohibition? — to make sure that all citizens remain sober at all times, if only because no one can get an alcoholic drink? So no one gets drunk, or becomes unruly; husbands stop beating their wives, tell bedtime stories to their children and help out with the washing.

But in practice it doesn’t happen like that. Prohibition has never worked. They tried it out in the United States and gave it up. In India, several states tried it and found that they had to annul it. Instead of making people give up drinking alcohol or even become temperate, it somehow has the opposite effect.

In a social order in which everyone who takes a drink becomes a criminal, even normally well-behaved citizens lose all respect for law. Prohibition sets off a whole new witch’s brew of evils and absurdities, its own jargon, even.

When I first went to America, in the early sixties, I found that wherever I was taken to a meal in a restaurant — in the most expensive or most ordinary which were called ‘diners’ as soon as you sat at the table, a waiter would come and place a glass of water before every customer."It’s just the custom in America," I was told.

But how had the custom come about? I was later told that it dated back to the thirties and the days of prohibition. Most eating places also served liquor, and every day there were police raids. Water was a safety measure. The outer rooms in the more expensive restaurants, and the front tables in the less expensive ones, were occupied by people waiting to be arrested. They had been paid to sit there and act as decoys, so that while they are being arrested, the paying customers had time to pour away their whisky sours or bathtub gin-and-tonics into potted plants and pretend to be drinking from the glasses of water that the management had thoughtfully provided.

These bars and restaurants which sold alcoholic drinks in flagrant defiance of the prohibition laws, were called Speakeasies. Speak-easy: Neither Shakespeare nor Milton had known that word and nor, for that matter, has Thomas Hardy. It came in during the years of prohibition and fell out of use as soon as they repealed prohibition, so that today even Americans have to look up its meaning in a dictionary.

And here is one explanation of why during the days of prohibition, honeymooning American couples went hotels at the Niagara Falls. On the other side of the river was Canada, a foreign country, and where you could buy all the alcohol you wanted openly. Canada was paradise simply because it had no prohibition.

Just as during Morarjibhai’s term of Chief Minister of Bombay, Daman, only a few hours’ drive from Bombay had become a thriving tourist centre. In those days, Daman was Portuguese territory and thus, for prohibition-afflicted Bombay, a paradise.

Bombay’s prohibition became Daman’s source of riches. I myself remember going there in the mid-sixties and thus, at a time when Daman was very much a part of India. But, in those days and right until the mid-eighties, it remained a tiny pocket of Goa, and thus, out of the clutches of prohibition. I alongwith a friend had driven from Bombay and, since it was the middle of the week, had found overnight accommodation in what was then said to be Daman’s most elegant hotel. But it seemed that on week-ends, Daman became a suburb of Bombay , and I remember we had to leave well in time on a Friday for them to have our room ready for the rush of dehydrated refugees from prohibition — which began on Friday afternoons.

The friend who had driven me to Daman had been there several times before, and told me that he knew the drill of how to smuggle out a whole case of whisky from Daman by emptying the contents into a coloured plastic can. But since our itinerary did not include any areas under prohibition, I was able to persuade him that it was hardly worth the risk. A useless precaution, as I discovered, because at the excise checkpost we were waved through without so much as a cursory check. "The Gujarat police is really civilised," my friend told me. "They only make their money from the big operators. It’s only the Bombay police who’re the pikers."

Prohibition in India was the Emperor’s Clothes by another name, a great pretence. I knew a police chief in what was then the Central Provinces who ordered a raid on the house of a famous actress while a drink party was in progress because she had not invited him to the party: and policemen who did not themselves drink were a rarity. Many of the ministers in states which had prohibition were themselves drinkers, and to have one of them at your party was an insurance against being raided. And did not that high priest of prohibition, Morarji Desai, himself know that the prohibition laws were regularly violated by a member of his own household?

The attitude of civilised citizens to the absurdities of prohibition is encapsulated in an incident that Khushwant Singh wrote about in his weekly column many years ago.

Khushwant had gone to Madras, as it was called before it became Chennai, and was staying with the Governor of Tamil Nadu whom he know well. The state was then under prohibition. So when, before joining his host for dinner, Khushwant asked a servant to bring some soda and ice to his room so that he could make a drink from an ‘emergency’ bottle he invariably carried in a handbag, the governor, a fellow Sikh, must have caught on to what his guest was up to. His Excellency stamped into Khushwant’s room, full of indignation and holding forth about how, because he was the Governor of the state, it was up to him to see that its laws were strictly observed. Khushwant, unregenerate, argued that for an adult to take a drink in the privacy of his room was something of a birthright and it was ridiculous to think of it as a crime. No doubt some choice Punjabi obscenities were traded between host and guest. The confrontation ended up in bearhugs, with the Governor himself ordering an ADC to make sure that henceforth a bottle of premium scotch was kept in Khushwant’s room. "How can you think of drinking your own whisky when you’re my guest?"

The moral, if that is the word, must be that legislation is no answer to alcohol abuse. But then nothing else seems to be either. Denmark tried to ensure this by making alcohol too expensive for the man in the street. But then the man in the street is also a born survivor, never to be deterred by artificial barriers. So the Danes daily go on what are called ‘Spirit Ships’, which, within forty minutes take them out into international waters, and there, of course, all drinks and cigarettes are duty free.

What was Daman to Bombay under prohibition, the Spirit Boat is to the Danes: Sanctuary.