Nagaland’s liquor dilemma demands more than competing postures
Moa Jamir
As the tragedy involving suspected spurious alcohol in Tuensang surfaces, two distinct narratives are taking shape. Supporters of the Nagaland Liquor Total Prohibition (NLTP) Act, 1989, which came into force on April 24, 1990, attribute it to lax implementation and call for stronger enforcement. The argument also takes on a religious dimension, with some invoking abstinence as a moral imperative and, less subtly, framing drinking and its consequences in terms of sin and punishment.
The counterargument is less theological: if spurious liquor is itself a consequence of the Act and prohibition on paper can hardly be mistaken for poorly implementation on the ground. A law routinely circumvented does not become effective merely by repeatedly asserting its moral credentials.
Officially, Nagaland remains a ‘dry State’. The 1989 Act prohibits the transport, import or possession of liquor; its sale or purchase; consumption; manufacture; and even the use or keeping of materials, utensils, implements or apparatus for manufacturing liquor.
The ground reality, however, reveals a stark contrast. As evident from the present incident, and as noted in this column before, Nagaland has a thriving network of watering holes catering to both occasional drinkers and regular tipplers. The existence of this parallel ecosystem is hardly a secret, while an open border with liberal monitoring hardly helps.
The Church-led campaign that brought prohibition to the forefront can legitimately argue that alcohol has serious social consequences and that abstinence serves a larger social and public-health objective. But the high moral ground has also, at times, hardened into dogmatism.
The irony is that tipplers carry a double tag: ‘sinner’ from a religious standpoint and ‘offender’ under the law. Yet neither appears to have stopped drinking.
Indeed, national surveys tell a more prosaic story. According to the National Family Health Survey-5 (2019-21), 23.9% of men aged 15-49 in Nagaland reported consuming alcohol, compared with 22.9% nationally. Three years later, the NFHS-6 factsheet (2023-24) indicated that consumption had risen to 26.9%, against a national average of 18.9%. Among women, the corresponding figures were 1.6% in Nagaland and 1.1% nationally.
Statistics, of course, do not settle a moral argument. But they make it considerably harder to pretend that prohibition has eliminated alcohol consumption. The NLTP debate, therefore, is not simply about whether alcohol is good or bad. It is about what prohibition has achieved, where it has fallen short, and its collateral consequences.
Increasingly, the hypocrisy surrounding the policy is becoming more conspicuous. The Church is understandably uncompromising on prohibition, while its righteous indignation is not always equally evident on corruption, poor governance and failures in basic public-service delivery. The State, meanwhile, maintains a ‘stringent’ prohibition law on paper, while ground reality, including apparent relaxations on special occasions, points to a more pragmatic and sometimes selective approach.
In such a scenario, the debate over the pros and cons risks becoming little more than an exercise in extremes. Why should the two positions not meet somewhere in the middle? Clearly, they should.This does not necessarily mean abandoning the NLTP Act, nor endorsing unfettered access to alcohol. Rather, it means confronting the uncomfortable evidence that the present arrangement is failing to deliver. Three decades is long enough to distinguish between a policy objective and a policy outcome.
Between absolute dogmatism and unfettered availability lies a considerable chasm. The question, therefore, is not who is the ‘rightest’ of them all, but whether the two twains can meet somewhere in the middle, beyond competing postures and closer to what works in practice.
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