Beer and wine parlours were opened on Monday at about 160 of the 418 Kerala bars closed down on March 31 last due to lack of required quality standards, thanks to the Congress-led UDF Cabinet’s decision to issue licences to run soft booze to all these bars as part of the dilution of the liquor policy envisaging total liquor ban in the State in ten years.
Anti-liquor campaigners described the permission given for opening of such a large number of beer-wine parlours simultaneously as a conspiracy to open “boozers’ nurseries” but employees of these bars, who were out of job for the past nine months, cheered the decision and celebrated the reopening with fire-crackers and sweets at many places.
As per the liquor policy announced by Congress Chief Minister Oommen Chandy on August 22, these 418 bars were to remain closed forever and the remaining 312 bars were to be closed down by September 12 last. As per the policy, bars functioning at five-star hotels alone were to be allowed to continue in operation.
However, all these 312 bars are still in operation on the basis of court rulings the bar owners had earned. Antagonizing the anti-liquor campaigners who had cheered the liquor policy, Chandy watered down his own liquor policy by announcing on December 18 that the 418 bars closed on March 31 would be allowed to run beer-wine parlours considering “practicality”.
“In effect, the Government has now defeated its own liquor policy and betrayed all those who had praised it for the original plan to ban all booze,” said a senior priest of the Catholic Church, whose anti-liquor committee had been agitating against the dilution of the liquor policy. “The fact is that Chandy and the Government have sold Kerala to the liquor lobby,” he added.
Sales at the newly opened beer-wine parlours started on Monday evening only though these bars had got licences on Friday itself. They had been unable to take stocks because the warehouses of the Kerala State Beverages Corporation, the State-owned monopoly booze distributor, had been closed on the past three days due to public holidays.
The beer-wine parlour licences are being given after inspection by Excise officials of bar premises for ensuring compliance with quality standards. As many as 269 bars have applied for beer-wine parlour licences and 180 have got licences. Almost all the 418 bars had upgraded their facilities after they were closed on the pretext of not complying with quality standards.
“We are happy that sales have started once again,” said an employee of a bar-turned beer-wine parlour in Thiruvananthapuram on Monday evening. “It is fact that we won’t get the kind of money we were getting earlier because the revenues are sure to be less. However, something is better than nothing,” he added.
The Chief Minister, while announcing the decision to issue beer-wine parlour licences, had said that this step was being taken to ensure that the employees did not lose their jobs and that ban on all kinds of booze was beginning to hurt the tourism industry. Over a dozen bar employees had committed suicide due to financial difficulties since these bars were closed.
It is not yet clear whether owners of all these 418 bars will apply for beer-wine parlour licences because there are doubts about the possibility of running the business profitably. However, they have got legal advice that they may not get permission to continue the business if they do not apply for licence now.