Saturation point

IF THE chief minister of the southern Indian state of Kerala, Oommen Chandy, has his way, booze will be banned in India’s hardest-drinking state within a decade. He is already getting tough. On September 12th, three days after the alcohol-soaked holiday of Onam, officials will finish shutting down 730 bars in cheaper hotels. They plan to close dozens of liquor shops each year. Mr Chandy can claim a mandate for his zeal, as India’s constitution has long urged state governments to “endeavour to bring about prohibition of…intoxicating drinks”. Still, his initiative has come as a shock.

Kerala does have a drinking problem. At 8.3 litres of alcohol per citizen per year, its rate of consumption is the highest in India. This may seem light compared with most European countries; Belarus, for example, drinks twice as much. But the figures are misleading. Most Muslims and many Hindus in Kerala are teetotal, as are most women. This means some people are drinking far more than the average amount. According to the Alcohol and Drug Information Centre, an NGO, 25% of all hospital admissions and 69% of all crimes in the state are due in part to intoxication.

But Mr Chandy may have political concerns as well as health-related ones. His chief rival, V.M. Sudheeran, had been winning support by taking a hard line against drinking. Politicians are mindful of how Punjab’s narcotics problem galvanised support for an upstart party that made it an issue. Public opinion in Kerala has been swinging against the bottle.

Outright prohibition, however, has a poor record. The northern state of Gujarat has stayed nominally dry since 1950, while breeding a “hooch mafia” and letting drinkers die by the dozen from bad moonshine. Kerala’s government has no idea how to replace the money it will lose along with its monopoly on sales of hard liquor. And tourism—which is this green, gorgeous land’s biggest earner of all—has just become that much harder to sell, not least to hard-drinking Europeans.