INDIA: Looking Backward

U.S. tourists nostalgic for the gamy days of the 1920s can find echoes of the Prohibition Era in present-day India. As the members of India's Central Prohibition Committee met last week in New Delhi, the capital around them went its merry alcoholic way. In private apartments converted into speakeasies, tired Delhi businessmen sipped beer at 10 rupees ($2) a bottle. In Connaught Circus, the heart of town, young spivs sold paper bags containing liquor, soda and ice. A man walking along with a bicycle tire over his shoulder might be on his way to fix a flat, but it was just as likely he was en route to a customer thirsty enough not to mind the rubbery taste of an inner tube.

Shades of Dutch & Legs. Three of India's 15 states have close to total prohibition ; nine others ban liquor in some areas. In all of them, bootleggers have come up with ploys undreamed of by Dutch Schultz or Legs Diamond. When eleven pregnant women filed onto one Bombay streetcar, an Indian cop with limited tolerance for coincidence arrested them all, found they were pregnant with football bladders filled with booze. Some bootleggers use lepers as delivery boys, confident that the police will shy away from searching them. Others cache their product in containers tied to the underside of manhole covers. Law enforcement is nightmarish in a land filled with palm trees that need only to be tapped to give the hard liquor ingredients of palm toddy.

In Bombay, the biggest of India's dry cities, a dead animal in someone's front yard is a tipoff that a still is in operation: the odor of the decaying animal helps kill the smell of hops. Illegal brewing is said to be India's "busiest cottage industry," and every new tin roof is taken as evidence that its owner has supplemented his income by engaging in the liquor trade. India's gangsters, called goondas, glory in such names as The Black Panther, rub out their rivals not with tommy guns but with iron rods, bicycle chains, broken bottles and knives. With bootleg profits running as high as 800%, goondas can afford impressive bribes to cops who earn only $16 a month. Seven Bombay policemen were recently charged with forcing a retired bootlegger back into business so they would not lose his payoffs.

As in the U.S., prohibition in India got its start through misdirected idealism. Mohandas Gandhi, the revered father of Indian independence, maintained that "there is no halfway house between drunkenness and prohibition," and under the Gandhian influence prohibition was specified as a national goal in India's constitution. Today, Finance Minister Morarji Desai, widely regarded as Nehru's most probable successor, is also the nation's most convinced prohibitionist.