How Dry I Am

In a belt-tightening measure intended to save money for national defense, India last week decreed an end to the import of foreign liquor. After existing stocks of Scotch and brandy are used up, Indian drinkers will have to depend on such local specialties as palm wine, rose petal liquor and a brew of saffron musk.

The decree was good news to India's flourishing bootleggers. Mohandas Gandhi's abstinence led most states to establish liquor-control laws; today they range from total prohibition in Madras, Bombay and Gujarat, to restrictions in Calcutta (every Wednesday is a dry day) and New Delhi (two dry days per week).

India's experience with prohibition echoes that of the U.S. According to a longtime resident, officially dry Bombay has become a "gigantic distillery where most of the citizens either drink, brew or smuggle in liquor with the kind of know-how that would have made Dutch Schultz green with envy." Speakeasies can be found in luxurious midtown apartments and in one-room shacks on the city's swampy outskirts. Sometimes the booze is genuine Scotch sneaked ashore from visiting freighters; more often it is a strange local concoction with a name like Jungle Flower, which has been distilled from such ingredients as varnish, kerosene, gasoline or rotting bananas.

Corruption is widespread. In New Delhi a police officer was caught shipping whisky to Bombay in crates labeled "Government of India Records." An illegal still was found in a Bombay compound owned (but not occupied) by Finance Minister Morarji Desai, an ardent prohibitionist. One bootlegger proved to be the chauffeur of Bombay's chief justice, and his still was located in his employer's garage. The police of Maharashtra state informed local officials that they had to neglect ordinary criminals because they spent so much time on prohibition raids.

Pressure is growing to scrap prohibition, and to boost India's own alcohol production so that the state can collect substantial taxes. Even India's saintly President Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan seems to have got the message. At a recent New Delhi meeting of the World's Woman's Christian Temperance Union, he hinted that prohibition might not be the answer, observing: "It is not by legislation that one can control drinking, but by what training youth receive in their homes.''

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