Vikiho Kiba
The hum of diesel engines on NH-29 tells a story no official statistic fully captures. As dusk falls, cars and two-wheelers from Nagaland quietly stream across the border into Assam. Their purpose is neither trade nor tourism, it is thirst. From Dimapur to Loharjan and Bokajan, a silent economy flows: Nagaland’s money for Assam’s liquor. What began as a trickle has turned into a tide, revealing not merely economic distortion but also moral and theological erosion in a society once proudly defined by its faith.
A Costly Sip in the Hills: Nagaland’s liquor ban, in force since 1989 under the Nagaland Liquor Total Prohibition (NLTP) Act, was conceived as a moral safeguard, a collective vow to uphold Christian virtue and social sobriety. Yet, more than three decades later, its unintended consequences are painfully visible: adulterated and overpriced liquor floods the black market, threatening both health and honesty.
What sells in Assam for Rs 600 becomes Rs 1,500 or more in Dimapur’s back alleys, often diluted with toxic chemicals to stretch profits. According to unofficial estimates from enforcement officials and local vendors, Nagaland loses crores of rupees each month to cross-border liquor purchases. For every bottle legally sold in Assam, an illegal twin is resold inside Nagaland at two or three times the price. A law meant to curb consumption has thus birthed a thriving underground economy, economically parasitic, physically dangerous, and spiritually hollow.
The Shadow Economy of Addiction: Alcohol consumption in Nagaland no longer follows the old rhythms of community feasts or festive moderation. It has become a symptom of collective disillusionment. The youth, burdened by unemployment and cultural drift, seek solace in intoxication. The older generation, long accustomed to discreet indulgence, now drinks not for joy but for escape.
Across Dimapur, Kohima, and Mokokchung, one hears the same refrain: people drink because life feels unbearable. The bottle has become both confession and anesthetic. Yet what they consume is often poison. Doctors in Dimapur report a steady rise in cases of alcohol-induced liver failure and methanol poisoning, many linked to spurious brands disguised as “IMFL” (Indian-Made Foreign Liquor) but brewed in unsafe backyard distilleries.
Economics Without Ethics: From a monetary standpoint, the drain is staggering. Economists in Kohima estimate that millions of rupees exit the state each month, enriching Assam’s liquor industry while impoverishing Nagaland’s own economy. This is not merely about private indulgence, it is about the misdirection of public wealth. Money that could strengthen local enterprises, education, and healthcare instead flows outward to distillers and smugglers.
The commercial network around alcohol, drivers, carriers, police lookouts, petty traders, thrives not on efficiency but on moral ambiguity. A bottle in Assam costs less because it is regulated, taxed, and tested. In Nagaland, it costs more precisely because it is forbidden. Prohibition has created what philosophers might call a “moral inversion economy”one where the price of sin rises while the value of virtue collapses.
Theological Blind Spots: Here lies the deeper paradox. Nagaland, a state that once declared itself “for Christ,” now finds itself enslaved not by open rebellion but by moral pretence. The NLTP Act stands as a monument to virtue, yet everyday life tells another story. Churches denounce drunkenness from the pulpit, but few address the economic hypocrisy that sustains it.
The prophet Amos condemned those who “sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals.” In modern Nagaland, the equivalent might be: those who sell public virtue for private convenience. The sin is no longer in the bottle but in the duplicity surrounding it. The law prohibits, the market profits, and the conscience numbs.
Christianity without courage becomes cosmetic. When the Church is silent about economic injustice while moralising about private behaviour, it loses its prophetic calling. The early Christians in Acts shared their possessions so “none lacked among them.” Today, Christians in Nagaland watch their youth impoverished and poisoned, yet few ask why a bottle of truth is costlier than a barrel of hypocrisy.
The Price of a Better Pour: For many Nagas, Assam represents not temptation but fairness. The irony is sharp: a Naga villager crossing the border finds cleaner, cheaper, safer alcohol in a “non-Christian” state than in his own “Christian” one. What does that reveal about moral governance?
Assam’s prices reflect regulation and taxation, an economy of order. Nagaland’s inflated prices reflect prohibition and concealment, an economy of denial. Each trip across the border becomes not a pleasure excursion but a referendum on policy failure, a pilgrimage of disillusionment rather than devotion.
Philosophical Paradox: Law Versus Liberty. At its core, the issue rests on the tension between moral idealism and practical realism. The prohibition law assumed that virtue could be legislated; it mistook moral aspiration for social capability. Yet true morality arises from conviction, not compulsion. As St. Paul wrote, “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are beneficial.”
When divorced from compassion and practicality, law becomes what Kierkegaard called “the tyranny of the good.” In banning alcohol outright, the state has not eradicated sin, it has merely pushed it into the shadows, where it festers unexamined. Prohibition has produced neither sobriety nor sanctity, only secrecy, and secrecy, as history teaches, is the enemy of reform.
Logic and Contradiction: Logically, prohibition violates the very principles it claims to uphold:
• If the aim is to protect health, the state should ensure purity, not drive citizens to adulterated substitutes.
• If the goal is moral integrity, it should foster honesty and education, not hypocrisy and smuggling.
• If the purpose is to prevent economic leakage, it should halt the outflow of cash, not enable it through policy blindness.The resultis paradoxical: prohibition preserves vice by pretending to outlaw it.
The Commercial Consequence: Commercially, Nagaland’s black-market liquor trade represents a reverse subsidy, the poor pay more for poorer goods. The urban elite, with private access to imported brands, drink discreetly and safely. Thus, a law framed to promote equality now reinforces class disparity.
Assam’s distilleries and bonded warehouses profit handsomely from this moral mismatch. Their revenues swell not because of entrepreneurial brilliance but because Nagaland’s moral economy has collapsed under contradiction. Markets, like rivers, flow where resistance is least—and today that current runs eastward.
A Call for Honest Reform: What Nagaland needs is not moral posturing but moral intelligence. A state that spends crores on enforcement raids while losing crores more to external markets is not righteous, it is irrational. Legalisation alone will not solve the problem; what is required is regulated transparency, public health awareness, and theological honesty.
The Church, too, must reclaim its prophetic role, not by condemning drinkers, but by confronting injustice. The Gospel calls not for blindness to human frailty but for honesty about it. Jesus turned water into wine, not to endorse indulgence but to reveal abundance without deceit. Likewise, good governance must combine principle with realism. A moral law that ignores human reality breeds corruption faster than the vice it seeks to suppress.
Conclusion: The Gospel and the Glass. Ultimately, the “price of a better pour” is not merely monetary, it is moral. Each quiet trip across the Assam border signifies more than the purchase of a bottle; it marks a pilgrimage of conscience, a subtle yet steady crossing from integrity to indulgence, from conviction to convenience. The tragedy of Nagaland’s prohibition, therefore, does not lie in the fact that people drink, but in the quiet deceit that the law compels them to practice.
When faith is forced secretive, hypocrisy becomes its refuge. What began as a moral safeguard has hardened into moral theatre, an outward form of godliness that has lost its inward truth. The Gospel, after all, does not condemn the grape but the guile; not the act of drinking, but the heart that hides. Christ’s first miracle at Cana was not the making of scarcity, but of abundance, wine flowing freely, sanctifying human celebration within the bounds of sincerity. Seen through that lens, the issue confronting Nagaland today is not so much one of prohibition as of pretense.
If both the State and the Church can find the courage to face this truth, to prefer repentance over reputation, and authenticity over appearance, reform is still within reach. But if image continues to matter more than integrity, if we cling to the semblance of holiness rather than its substance, then the road from Dimapur to Loharjan will remain well-travelled. And every bottle bought there will stand as a quiet witness, not to thirst, but to our deeper failure to quench it at home: in truth, in grace, and in the freedom that the Gospel alone affords.
When prohibition turns into hypocrisy, the real intoxication is moral deceit.
