Hours after funeral processions leave, dead men come back walking

At 4 in the morning, cans full of hooch brewed in the village are put in a truck, hidden under a cot. A man lies on the cot feigning to be dead with tulsi leaves on eyelids. A few young men, all pretending to be pall-bearers, accompany the body’. An hour later, trucks with all the trappings of a funeral procession leave for their destinations, mostly in Calcutta and in its suburbs.

But the destinations are not any cremation grounds, they are retailers located at different points. They sell the hooch packed in small polythene bags weighing about 280-300 gm and costing Rs 5. At about 4 in the afternoon the mission is completed and the dead man’ and pall-bearers are ready to go home.

The economy of Leningarh and its adjoining areas with a population of about 15,000 people survives on hooch. The stench of hooch (cholai) hits you when you approach the village. The brewing takes place at a 4-acre vacant plot near the village.

Hooch is the source of living — and death. Says Manisha, a housewife: “Teenagers start drinking very early and they gradually kill themselves.” “But since we don’t have any other way of eking out a living, we have to do it,” she adds.

Excise officials as well as the police are aware of it but can’t do anything about it. “The economy of the whole area depends on brewing the liquor and selling it,” says Arun Mishra, Commissioner of Excise, West Bengal. “We conducted several raids to the area to stop this menace but they start again,” adds Mishra, whose previous posting was district magistrate of North 24 Parganas.

D Dasgupta, sub-divisional police officer, Belghoria, under whose jurisdiction Leningarh falls, agrees: “We sincerely tried to stop this by carrying out raids and tried to destroy the syndicate but this involves their livelihood and we had not met with much success.”

Smuggling hooch in fake funeral processions is just one of the various ways of transportation. “Sometimes they carry it in cans on bicycles, sometimes they carry them in baskets covered by vegetables,” says Pradip Kumar Naha, who was a dead man’ by profession but later gave up his job. “Sometimes young women carry the pouches wrapped around their waist,” Naha adds.

And both the police and the Excise Department know their modus operandi. “At every police station there is one dak babu’ who collects money from us,” says Mrinmoy Hazra (not his real name) a brewer. “They know that these funeral processions are all a cover-up for smuggling hooch and there are several points where we have to bribe policemen and excise officials to get past the checkposts,” Hazra says.

Dasgupta knows about police’s connivance but he says he could not do much about it. “There are black sheep everywhere. And somehow (the trade) will be carried out because the villagers also have to eat. How can we stop such desperate people?” he says.

Mishra says that the government has plans to introduce cheap country liquor which can check the growth of this cottage industry. “At least if we have this, we hope people will not buy this illicit liquor,” he adds.