Former Union Minister and senior Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Raghuvansh Prasad Singh has strongly opposed the new Prohibition Act imposed by the Mahagathbandhan government in Bihar, an alliance between Janata Dal (U) led by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, the RJD and the Congress.
Mr. Singh told The Hindu in an exclusive interview that the new law levying a communal fine on villages and the arrest of entire households where alcohol has been found goes against the “spirit of jurisprudence”.
“This is not the first time that Bihar is seeing prohibition. It was done in 1977 under the leadership of late Karpoori Thakur. That government fell soon and the one that followed repealed it,” he said. “What Nitish Kumar did till 2015 was the exact opposite of what he is doing now. When he became Chief Minister, he rapidly expanded the availability of alcohol, often boasting that revenue from alcohol had jumped from Rs. 200 crores to Rs. 4,000 crores. He made alcohol, which was available in a controlled way in the State [till then], available in residential areas, near schools, colleges etc. The revenue from this, he said, was being spent on buying bicycles for girl students.”
“We in the RJD opposed this. I raised this matter at least 12 times in Parliament, and at one time, 16 MPs associated with me on my intervention,” Mr. Singh said.
Blames Nitish “I had declared that Nitish Kumar was the ideological killer of the Mahatma, as the latter had decried alcoholism. But he was claiming that he was earning high revenue and distributing cycles for the education of the girl child. In the run-up to the latest round of elections, he announced that he would impose the Prohibition as he saw that there were hardly any blocks in the State where women had not opposed it,” he added.
“When he announced Prohibition, I praised Nitish Kumar,” Mr. Singh claimed. “The latest law on prohibition in force in the state, however, of communal fining and arrest, is against the spirit of jurisprudence. Jurisprudence is the eye of the law. A 100 guilty men can be let off but to convict an innocent man is unacceptable. This law runs counter to that sense. Say, if a young boy in the family is a black sheep, an alcoholic, is it fair to arrest the women, grandparents and parents of the boy?” he asked. “If a whip had not been issued, not a single MLA would have supported this Bill.” In fact, alcohol smuggling had gone up, he said.
Defends Shahabuddin Mr. Singh also justified the comments made by the recently released don and former Lok Sabha MP Shahabuddin. “He [Shahabuddin] is toeing his own party’s line. We are still a separate party. We haven’t merged — we are in an alliance government. So why should he acknowledge Nitish Kumar as his leader?” he asked. “The Janata Dal (U) needn’t be so sensitive to Nitish Kumar being called a ‘circumstantial chief minister’. It is a reference to his political journey. Forget chief ministers, we have had Prime Ministers, from P.V. Narasimha Rao to Deve Gowda to Manmohan Singh who can be termed ‘circumstantially created prime ministers’,” he said.
