Boozers in Kerala on Sunday celebrated the opening of at least 77 liquor outlets at hotels classified as three-star and above as their licences were renewed by the CPI(M)-led lDF Government after a two-and-a-half-year-long partial Prohibition imposed by the former Congress-led UDF Government.
The 77 bars resumed operations on Sunday as per the lDF’s new liquor policy by which bar licences of hotels with three-star classification and above could be renewed provided they are beyond the 500-metre distance limit from National and State Highways as stipulated by the Supreme Court. As many as 81 hotels had sought renewal of licences.
A total of 100 bars would be in operation in the State from now on including the 23 bars at five-star hotels that had not been affected by the UDF’s pro-Prohibition policy. The three-star hotels whose bar licences have now been renewed had gone out of operation in accordance with the former regime’s policy by which only hotels with five-star classification could run bars.
The highest number of newly opened bars is in Ernakulam district - 20 - under which Kerala’s commercial capital Kochi falls. No bars reopened in two of the 14 districts, Pathanamthitta and Kasaragod, as no hotels from there had applied for licence. Ten bars reopened in Kochi city alone. Mountainous Idukki and Wayanad districts have only one and two bars respectively.
Boozers could be seen celebrating the opening of the new bars across the State, especially in Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram. Heavy rush was seen at almost all the newly opened bars on Sunday morning itself. In Kollam, tipplers who celebrated the occasion with firecrackers in front of a bar were taken into custody by the police.
“This has come as a great blessing for people like me who drink a peg or two a day after a hard day’s work. I thank the lDF,” said Varkey Thomas, a boozer at a Kochi bar. “Now, we won’t have to spend long hours in the queue at retail liquor shops and then search for a safe place to drink. I hope this is only a beginning and more bars will open soon,” he added.
Though the new policy had come into force on Saturday, bars opened only on Sunday as the first day of every month is a “dry day” in Kerala. At several bars that could not open at 11.00 am due to non-arrival of stocks, boozers could be seen expressing impatience. “We don’t blame them. They have been waiting for this moment for long,” said a hotel owner in Kozhikode.
The lDF, which had announced even before the last Assembly election that it did not stand for Prohibition unlike the UDF but would focus on promotion of abstinence from booze, had decided to redraft the previous regime’s liquor policy on the grounds that the partial Prohibition had hit the tourism sector badly and that it had failed in bringing down alcohol consumption.
“As an hotelier, I can say for sure that the UDF decision to close down bars had hit tourism badly. In fact, that decision had caused a spurt in the consumption of Ganja and other narcotic substances,” said a Kochi hotelier. Statistics available with the Excise Department agree with the hotelier’s claim.
There were a total of 730 bars in Kerala before 418 of them were closed down on March 31, 2014 for lack of the required facilities. All the remaining bars, except those at five-star hotels, went out of operation as per the liquor policy announced by the former Government in August that year.
The UDF and the anti-liquor outfits including that of Kerala’s Catholic Church have threatened to launch intense agitations against the reopening of bars. “We will do whatever we can to ensure that the evil of liquor is driven out of the State,” said Fr Paul Thelekkatt of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church.