CHANDIGARH, March 29: When popped bubbly and uncorked bottles ring in the dawn of April 1, prohibition will be over in Haryana. But its legacy will continue to haunt the administration and the society for a long time.The balance sheet of Bansi Lal's populist programme - which boomeranged on his party - shows a huge backlog of excise cases, rampant illicit distillation, a wide network of bootleggers and smugglers and a police force which learned to share the spoils of the ban. None of these will melt in the thin air on the midnight of March 31.More than one lakh cases of violation of the excise laws (including 40,000 bailable ones), involving about 1.10 lakh persons, are pending in courts all over the state. This has more than doubled the workload of the police and the courts.The pile of cases is big enough to ground the police force and burden the judicial system. ``While the workload of courts has more than doubled, there has been no increase in manpower'', says an additional district andsessions judge. That only 4,500 cases have been decided so far drives home the magnitude of the problem.``We can now concentrate on our real work of checking crime and maintaining law and order,'' says a police officer at Panchkula. But the cases are going to hinder their work as each case requires the presence of at least three policemen in court. ``If the cases are not withdrawn, the entire force will be spending hours every day in courts,'' says the officer.Although former Prohibition Minister Ganeshi Lal, who lost his department with the abolition of prohibition, said the cases would be dealt with ``affectionately and sympathetically'', the government is yet to take a decision on the fate of the cases.Another major problem the government is facing is illicit distillation, which, if unchecked, would belie the government's expectations of mopping up Rs 1,000 crore from the liquor trade.Before prohibition was introduced, illicit distillation was confined to parts of Kaithal, Karnal, and Hisardistricts. Now it has spread to Kurukshetra, Fatehabad, Jind, Sirsa and parts of Faridabad too.Shyam Chand from Teek village in Kaithal says that while earlier ``one or two'' persons in the village brewed illicit liquor, now the number is not less than 50. Unemployed youths and farm workers took to illicit distillation to make quick money, they allegedly thrived with police connivance. Similar stories abound in several Haryana villages.Officers feel that checking illicit distillation would be tough given the nexus between the distillers and the police, which had become highly corrupt during prohibition. Besides, the illicit stuff is not only cheaper than the liquor bought from vends but is readily available in the villages.Another source of liquor, besides illicit distillation, was smuggling from the neighbouring states. Opening of vends would check it, but it would also render jobless hundreds of urban unemployed youths who had made liquor smuggling a profession. An excise officer fears theywould now be looking for alternative means of making money and ``who can say that many of them would not turn to crime?''April 1 is just hours away and the government may find the hangover of prohibition tougher to tackle than prohibition itself.
