MOKOKCHUNG, SEPTEMBER 10 (MExN): The Ao Baptist Arogo Mungdang (ABAM), the top Baptist church forum of the Ao community in Nagaland, said that it will continue to relentlessly fight for the enforcement of the contentious Nagaland Liquor Total Prohibition Act.
With open calls for repealing the Prohibition law resurfacing, including from seating legislators and more recently, from the Naga Council Dimapur, the ABAM joined the Nagaland Baptist Church Council and Chakhesang Baptist Church Council, in opposing any move to review the said law. “We choose to hold firm to the ways our Christian foreparents of Nagaland who fasted with tears and sacrificed their lives for… The Nagaland Liquor Total Prohibition Act, 1989,” proclaimed the ABAM in a statement.
Terming alcoholism as an ongoing threat, it said that the issue needs to be treated with profound gravity by every sensible citizen. According to it, the movement for proscribing alcohol was spearheaded by the Church, women and youth organizations to extinguish what it claimed was “the vices of liquor and its use.” It resulted in the state government passing the Act on March 29, 1990, and as rumour has it, Nagaland became a “Dry State.” It claimed that revoking the Act would heighten “physio-psycho-social deterioration, moral decay, spiritual tarnish, and social paralysis of the Nagas on a large-scale.” It followed this up by posing, “There may be lucrative revenue for few hands but who will be responsible for the victims of this menace?”
It then linked alcohol to increased immorality, broken homes and endless domestic violence, rise of death, negligence of work or responsibility and financial loss.
While posing if free access to selling and promoting liquor would guarantee heightened human value, it asked, “What would you opt for– the integration of human values or the increased economy?” “Who can guarantee the morality, spirituality and modesty of the Naga society will reach its peak because we remove the NLTP Act?”
