The long and twisted history of prohibition in Tamil Nadu

The declaration did not shock – it didn’t even surprise. There was in fact a sense of déjà vu when Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa promised prohibition in Tamil Nadu if her party, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, is re-elected to power. It was a promise that Tamil Nadu had heard many times.

Prohibition has a long and tumultuous history in Tamil Nadu, with an array of political leaders backing it at one time or another. Alcohol was first banned here in 1937, and the proscription has been imposed several times since.

Support for prohibition has been growing again since 2015, particularly after a Gandhian activist, Sasiperumal, died while demanding the closure of a liquor shop in Kanyakumari district. A few months later, a folk singer was arrested for alleged sedition because his songs criticised the Jayalalithaa government. One of the songs accused her of profiting from liquor and called for prohibition.

If not the state leadership, the state at least has gained from alcohol – a fifth of its annual revenues, amounting to Rs 22,000 crore, come from liquor. Giving this up will not be easy. The state has become so dependent on revenues from TASMAC, the company controlling alcohol sale, that it will find it difficult to continue to run its substantial social welfare schemes, says The Hindu.

The longest ban

The first liquor ban came soon after the Congress won the election for the first legislative assembly in British-ruled Madras Presidency in 1937.

The Congress, under the leadership of C Rajagopalachari, the first chief minister of Madras Presidency, banned all liquor first in Salem in 1937. By 1948, it had been applied to the entire state. To supplement lost government revenues, the party simultaneously introduced a sales tax.

Support for prohibition at that time cut across party lines, including from anti-caste reformer and activist EV Ramaswamy. Seven years before the prohibition had become official, Ramaswamy – who later became the driving force of the main opposition to the Congress, the Justice Party (later the Dravida Kazhagam) – hosted a conference on prohibition as part of the second provincial conference of the Self-Respect Movement in Erode in 1930.

Rajagopalachari’s prohibition turned out to be the longest one in the state. Throughout his life, he remained committed to that ideal. When in 1971, news emerged that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government was planning to lift prohibition, Rajagopalachari met Chief Minister M Karunanidhi to dissuade him. Karunanidhi was evidently unmoved. In 1971, he ended the prohibition on arrack, toddy and Indian-made foreign liquor.

On and off the wagon

Karunanidhi’s rationale for lifting the ban was that unless prohibition was imposed across India, other states that permitted liquor would continue to profit from it. Tamil Nadu, in the meanwhile, was missing out. Allegations of corruption in allotting liquor licences soon followed the DMK’s lifting of prohibition.

Two years after that, the government banned toddy shops once again. In 1974, it imposed total prohibition, first of arrack and then IMFL once again. Only permit-holders were permitted to purchase IMFL. As liquor consumption went underground, bootlegging spiked, leading to two sets of mass deaths in 1975 and 1976.

MG Ramachandran of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam won state elections in 1977 and was chief minister for three consecutive terms. Though Ramachandran had called strongly for prohibition while not in power, he lifted the ban on arrack and toddy in his second term in 1981, this time under heavy state monitoring and five separate laws.

In 1982-’83, the government allowed the private sector to begin manufacturing IMFL in Tamil Nadu. Then in 1983 came the Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation – better known as TASMAC, which is synonymous with IMFL in the state. This had a monopoly on wholesale trade of arrack and Indian-made foreign spirits.

More flip-flops

Arrack and toddy went off the table again on January 1, 1987 – Ramachandran died at the end of this year – and the new government under Karunanidhi decided to play ball once again. This time it was with the ultimately unsuccessful Tamil Nadu Spirit Corporation, or TASCO, a company charged with making IMFS and beer in 1989.

Following two more mass deaths related to spurious liquor in 1988 and 1990, the DMK revived arrack and toddy sales in 1990. Also that year, TASCO dropped IMFS and began to manufacture country liquor. A brainchild of Karunanidhi’s, this involved selling liquor in plastic pouches.

By 1991, the AIADMK returned to power, this time under J Jayalalithaa, who had promised to ban arrack and toddy if elected. She promptly fulfilled her promise. This ban on manufacture and sale of country liquor lasted for more than a decade.

Finally, in 2003, the AIADMK decided to bring IMFL retail back, but only under state control. TASMAC, which had until then been working as a wholesale trader, now staged a coup of sorts and took over more than 7,000 liquor shops across the state. It is now the only retailer of IMFL, which has enabled it to form a fifth of the state’s revenues. This policy, as the Tamil Nadu Commissionerate of Prohibition and Excise notes in its history of the flip-flops, “continues till date”.