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Journalism of Courage
The Catholic church in Kerala on Monday announced a statewide stir to prevent the Left Government from bringing in a “liquor revolution” in the state and helping “multinational liquor companies”.
Kerala already logs the highest per capita booze consumption in the country, over 8 litres. That is besides an alarmingly high rate of road accidents blamed on drunken driving. A study had found that some 72 per cent of all road accidents in the state last year involved drunk drivers.
The Kerala Catholic Bishops Council (KCBC) said the agitation would start with a fast in Kochi on Wednesday, involving all the 29 Catholic dioceses in Kerala. The church is particularly peeved at the Government move to reopen some 1,610 toddy (coconut palm liquor) shops that were closed down during AK Antony’s tenure as CM, and to liberalise the excise policy.
Many denominations of the church — one out of every five Keralites are Christians — have been trying to get their laity stay off the bottles, but with little success. Last Christmas, the Catholic church heads wrote to lakhs of families to stay off liquor during Christmas — which, besides Onam, is when Kerala boozes the most — and priests were busy reading out exhortations to make Christmas liquor-free in the Sunday masses. Result: Instead of liquor sales dropping, Kerala drank up a whopping 26 per cent more IMFL on the two days before Christmas, not counting the lakhs of litres of unaccounted toddy.
Archbishop M Susaipakyam of the Latin catholic Diocese demanded that the local bodies, and not the state Government, be allowed to decide if they wanted more liquor shops and bars in their areas. He maintained that the root problem was that successive governments went to liquor barons for poll funds, and the liquor policy being implemented would be catastrophic for the state.
The church’s anti-liquor campaign has already found support from the Congress-led Opposition, which too has declared an agitation if the Left Government did not backtrack.
