INDIA: In a novel effort at reforming them bootleggers and their customers in western India's state of Gujarat, the country's only province to enforce prohibition nearly six decades after independence, may soon be sweeping floors at Mahatma Gandhi's ashram, or spiritual retreat, instead of being jailed.
The state administration feels that "guilt pangs" while cleaning floors at the Sabarmati ashram in the state's largest city, Ahmedabad, would bring about a change of heart among recidivist bootleggers and drinkers.
Faced with over 1.2 million cases pending for decades under the Prohibition Act, Gujarat's Hindu nationalist-led government tabled a bill last month to introduce this unique community service to deal with its illicit alcohol problem. It has a comfortable majority in the legislature to ensure its passage.
"There are hundreds of thousands of prohibition-related cases pending in various courts. With its limited staff the home department is finding it tough to fight the rising menace," the state home and prohibition minister, Amit Shah, said.
He is convinced that sentencing bootleggers to sweep Gandhi's ashram will "minimise", if not altogether stop, alcohol-smuggling.
However, the numbers are stacked staggeringly against the administration. Last year alone, around 203,000 people were arrested for drinking, and 7,000 cases were registered against bootleggers. The authorities had also seized and destroyed 1.31 million alcohol bottles in 2004, a number that officials estimate was a "minor " fraction of the total amount sold and consumed.
Over the years liquor "barons", reportedly in cahoots with police and local politicians, had grown rich by selling locally brewed moonshine and supplies smuggled in from neighbouring Maharashtra and Rajasthan states that were plentiful but pricey. Ahmedabad residents said a bottle of whisky cost twice what it did in Rajasthan.
Reverence for Gandhi, who believed that alcohol ruined lives, led to successive Gujarat administrations persisting with prohibition, aware of their limited capacity to enforce it. "Prohibition suits everyone in government as they all make money out of it," a teetotaller Gujarat police officer said.
Over the years several other Indian provinces had introduced prohibition, mainly to garner female votes and to launch "moral rearmament " campaigns, but were forced to lift it following a drastic drop in revenue-earnings and liquor-smuggling from surrounding regions.
Gujarat's opposition parties criticised the government's move to waive jail sentences for bootleggers. "Soon one can see a rich man alight from his Skoda [ luxury car], walk into the Gandhi Ashram, sweep the floor and go home in a few hours," a senior Congress Party legislator said. It is merely an attempt to appease the police-bootlegger nexus and the liquor-swigging rich, he added.
But venerable Gandhians, like Praful Shah, feel the punishment just might work in reforming not only the bootleggers but the imbibers as well.
"Rendering community service is better than going to jail," an Ahmedabad resident charged with drinking said.