Gujarat HC fixes October 9 as date for hearing petitions challenging liquor prohibition law

More than 70 years since the law came into effect as the Bombay Prohibition Act, the constitutional validity of several of the provisions of the Act is now under challenge before the Gujarat High Court. The petitions will now be heard on merits after a Gujarat High Court bench in August 2021, comprising then Chief Justice Vikam Nath (now a Supreme Court judge) and Justice Biren Vaishnav had held the petitions to be maintainable. The petitions have not been heard on merits since.

The first petition challenging the prohibition law was filed in 2018 by three Gujarat residents. In their 2018 petition, several sections of the Gujarat Prohibition Act, 1949 and several rules of The Bombay Foreign Liquor Rules, 1953 were challenged. In 2019, five more petitions were filed challenging the law by litigants from various walks of life.

The petitioners challenged the law on two key grounds — the right to privacy, which has been held as a fundamental right by the Supreme Court in several judgments since 2017, and manifest arbitrariness. One of the grounds for challenging the sections pertaining to health permits and temporary permits to out-of-state tourists, is that of manifest arbitrariness, as there are no intelligible differences on who gets to drink and who does not, violating the Right to Equality under Article 14 of the Constitution.