Four funerals and a dry state: Bihar's numbing prohibition truth

Four Bihar men, on the last Sunday of August, sat down to drink in Bedhna village under Barh police station in Patna district. They were masons, neighbours and friends, and one of them had got his mother to pack some rice for a fish-and-drink gathering.

Within minutes of the first drink, all four collapsed. Mouths foaming, three of them reached Barh hospital. All four died.

The next day, four pyres burned together at the Sati Sthan ghat by the Ganga; an open liquor bottle was found in their room. The village was furious and frightened. Police sealed the room and sent samples for forensic examination.

Within two days, the official story had begun to split. Rural police officers said a village youth, angry over his sister’s relationship with one of the drinkers, had poisoned drinks and served the men. Others pointed to Indian-made foreign liquor (IMFL) possibly diluted with chemicals after being smuggled in from a neighbouring state. For some, the quick deaths were comparable to cyanide poisoning. The viscera report will settle the cause of death but not the debate over it.

The men should not have been holding a drinking party at all. Bihar banned the manufacture, sale, transport and consumption of alcohol in April 2016. Ten years on, the bottle in that room is the policy’s daily truth.

Bedhna is not a forgotten hamlet. It sits in Barh subdivision of Patna district, barely an hour from the state secretariat that has spent a decade enforcing prohibition. The men died close enough to the capital for their bodies to be referred to Patna Medical College and Hospital for autopsy, and far enough for the illegal liquor bottle to have been sourced easily.

Chief minister Samrat Choudhary is not lifting the liquor ban imposed by his predecessor Nitish Kumar. He earlier described prohibition as a historic decision taken for the welfare of women, insisting that half the state’s population still favoured it. He may not care that it causes a revenue loss of about Rs 20,000 crore every year.

While the statute survives, the zeal around it has cooled. But on September 9, the prohibition machinery was visible everywhere again. In Gaya, a team stopped a truck carrying 3,548 litres of foreign liquor. In Vaishali, 1,740 litres were found stacked inside a poultry farm under Baligaon police station limits. Siwan stopped a pick-up carrying 1,080 litres of beer and arrested two men. At Nawada’s Kawakol checkpost, a four-wheeler yielded 198 litres. In Bhagalpur, police opened a truck and counted 2,799 litres. Lakhisarai stopped a car and SUV carrying 540 litres, with three people arrested. Add up the day’s haul and it’s almost 10,000 litres—and that is only what six districts put on the noticeboard.

From Bhagalpur to Siwan, a Gaya highway to a Vaishali poultry shed, the state remains a permanent prohibition enforcement zone. Liquor smugglers have long improvised supply through mortuary vans, milk tankers, ambulances and false floors in vehicles. The September 9 seizures merely update the camouflaging techniques: pick-up, truck, SUV.

The profits are big enough for the illegal trade to treat arrest as a cost of doing business. The numbers behind that chase are immense and, in their own way, damning. Since 2016, Bihar has registered more than a million cases, arrested over 1.6 million people, seized around 45 million litres of alcohol and confiscated about 160,000 vehicles. Excise districts have multiplied. Drones, boats, scanners, breath analysers and border posts are now part of the landscape. This year, by May, the police had seized 1.75 million litres of liquor and arrested nearly 57,000 people.

A policy that requires this much effort has not cured the habit it set out to eliminate. It has, in fact, built a more exhausting version of the same struggle. Each seizure is a victory but also proof that the supply chain is alive.

Household data is another pointer. The National Family Health Survey-6 (conducted during 2023-24) found that 16.5 per cent of men aged 15 and above in Bihar still drink, up from 15.4 per cent in the previous round of the central government survey. Rural Bihar stands at 17.1 per cent, urban Bihar at 12.8 per cent. Among women, the figure is 0.4 per cent.

These are statistics of drinking—far from being abolished—changing its route. The highest drinking rates are in the southern districts bordering liquor-producing Jharkhand: Gaya, Jehanabad, Nawada, Jamui, Aurangabad, Nalanda and Patna. Geography is not a footnote. Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and West Bengal sell liquor openly. Nepal’s 800-km-long frontier is a daily crossing for work, worship and, if one wishes, a drink.

A ban inside one state cannot seal all that. The moral case behind prohibition keeps the law intact. Many women still associate alcohol with domestic abuse, vanished family income and resultant debt. For them, the government’s refusal to reopen thekas reflects seriousness about a social problem.

It is one reason Choudhary, Bihar’s first BJP chief minister, has chosen inheritance of the prohibition legacy over tinkering with it. A paper this year by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) called for the liquor ban to be lifted, arguing that violence against women had not declined and the illicit market had eaten into the fiscal gains. Choudhary answered it with the old coalition: women, Nitish’s legacy and a promise to account for himself in 2030.

Indeed, before prohibition, liquor was big revenue for Bihar, like any other state. After it, Bihar traded a tax base for a policing burden that now clogs the courts with drinkers, carriers and small-time sellers—a jail ledger heavier with the poor who drink, lighter with the men who own or supply the stock.

Then, there’s illegal alcohol. Adulteration is easy as fatal. East Champaran learnt that again in April when a hooch cluster killed at least five people. A police station in-charge was suspended. Officials speak of 354 spurious liquor deaths up to March this year, and more since. Opposition voices cite a higher figure.

The wider intoxicant map has not shrunk either. Codeine syrups, ganja, opium, heroin and injectable narcotics have moved into some of the space the theka once occupied. Shared needles are now part of an HIV/AIDS scare in a state that set out to protect the household with prohibition over a decade.

Bedhna is not an exception to that decade. It is the decade in a room. Whether the four men drank country liquor, adulterated IMFL or a drink poisoned over a private grievance, they drank in a market the state has spent so long putting to death.

In a licenced liquor shop, a bad bottle is a product with a name. In a dry state, it is a funeral, a theory and another first information report. Bihar remains dry in the gazette, wet at the borders, relentless in its raids and stubbornly alive to the trade it set out to end. Four pyres on a Ganga ghat are what that contradiction looks like when the raid comes too late.