How NOT To Evaluate Nitish Kumar's Alcohol Ban In Bihar

The electorate of Bihar has given a decisive mandate for the National Democratic Alliance, in excess of 200 seats in an Assembly of 243 . 

Women are widely seen as the forebears of this shift. Whether it is Jeevika Didis receiving Rs 10,000 or migrant women who returned to Bihar for Chhath and stayed back to vote, women displayed near-unanimous support for Nitish Kumar. Despite being 46 lakh fewer in number, four lakh more women voted than men.

With 71.6 per cent turnout, women voted 8.8 percentage points more than men, only 62.8 per cent of whom came out to cast their votes.

While this surge is often attributed to last-minute cash announcements, it is simplistic to overlook the role of prohibition in this.

Nitish Kumar traded nearly Rs 20,000 crore of annual revenue for women’s emotional and social investment in the state — a cost invisible in data but powerful at the booth.

Alcohol ban: necessity and criticism

In popular narratives, the ban is considered a failure due to shoddy implementation and the creation of a parallel economy. The rise in consumption of ganja (marijuana), toddy, cough syrup, inhalants, and hashish is also traced back to prohibition.

Another criticism is that it hurts women on two fronts — first, by getting the earning male member arrested, and second, by pushing her into the workforce merely to afford the legal fight to get him released.

Supporters of the ban however cite Lancet studies pointing to health benefits. They also argue that, proportionally, arrests related to illegal alcohol are very small relative to the state’s population, making the ban a net positive for Bihar.

Remarkably, both sides lean heavily on state-level aggregates, treating prohibition as a technocratic programme whose success can be audited by spreadsheets. To understand why this is not best way to judge it, we must first consider what alcohol consumption actually meant in Bihar — and who bore its costs.

What alcohol meant in Bihar

Like elsewhere, consumers fall broadly into two categories: those who drink leisurely and those who had fallen into its addiction. In Bihar, alcohol primarily served the second category.

Men working long hours on meagre salaries often turned to cheap, country-made liquor. The result was frequent loss of control, reinforced by a rural social atmosphere that normalised — even encouraged — such behaviour. Colleagues would indulge or enable it, sometimes out of personal sadism.

The consequence was borne entirely by women. They faced domestic violence, economic deprivation, livelihood instability, social stigma, and the double burden of earning while caring for children. Women often worked through the day only to be punished at night by the very person responsible for their hardship.

Locals say this was the story of every second family where the male crown-head was alcoholic.

Women’s lives became peaceful and predictable after prohibition

Seen from the perspective of these women, prohibition — even in its imperfect form — dramatically improved everyday life. Women who once received calls to drag their drunk husbands out of a foul drain now speak of evenings that are at least predictable.

The impossible choice between nurturing a newborn or tending to a sick man-child often narrowed to one. The monthly quarrel over whether money will go to ration or alcohol either disappeared or became infrequent. A daily wage earner who spent Rs 80–120 on cheap liquor now brings that money home more regularly.

Household savings rose without any scheme — simply because wastage reduced. A corresponding rise in savings among zero-balance bank accounts would likely capture this quiet shift.

The social environment changed too. The fear of a drunk man barging in at midnight, yelling or breaking things for no reason, is no longer the default soundtrack of life for socially and economically backward women.

Before 2016, markets in small towns and hamlets saw routine fights triggered by intoxication. After prohibition, shopkeepers, auto drivers, teachers, and other working-class people attest that these spaces are noticeably calmer. Women’s post-dusk mobility has improved in areas where drunk loitering used to be the biggest deterrent.

Legality decides morality

This shift occurred because drinking moved from being a casual, publicly accepted practice to something the drinker wants to hide, regulate, or avoid. Alcohol may not have vanished, but its social permissibility sharply declined — creating new room for self-restraint.

In Bihar, this stigmatisation was necessary because shame often works better than coded laws. Law operates top-down here: social behaviour rarely shapes the law; instead, legality shapes morality. When something is illegal, people tend to consider it immoral.

This explains Nitish Kumar’s preference for severe punishment under prohibition. While the severity does invite police harassment, it also makes the act itself socially reprehensible.

Women gaining a say in decision-making

There is also a profound socio-political effect. After prohibition, women — especially in rural Bihar — developed a sense of ownership over the state’s decision-making apparatus. For many, the arrest of an alcoholic husband was the first state intervention that acknowledged her suffering.

That such a self-serving metric exists reveals how rural women evaluate policy: not through revenue sheets but through dignity. This is arguably the largest state-sponsored initiative where women can directly say, “Nitish Ji ne yeh humare liye kiya.”

For women who earlier had virtually no say in household decisions, this marks an astronomical shift in autonomy and confidence. A decade later, that shift translated into women not voting along with their husbands.

This emotional alignment with having a say in governance has shaped female voting patterns across elections. It is not merely gratitude; it is dignity regained. Jeevika meetings, Panchayat discussions, and SHG circles are filled with stories of women defending the ban — not out of fear but lived experience.

In these stories, the government’s failure to eliminate alcohol entirely is not a big issue. Women simply wanted drinking to become inconvenient, less public, less impulsive, and socially embarrassing. The cascading effect was predictability, autonomy, and mobility — none of which appear in seizure data running into crores of litres.

The metrics that actually matter

These social transformations refuse to fit into simple metrics. There is no dataset to quantify peace inside a mud house at 9 pm or a child finally sleeping without hearing a parent scream. But these gains are real, and profound.

Policy analysts obsess over black markets and foregone revenues. But the metrics for women are entirely different: Has the nightly fear reduced? Has the household stabilised? Is the street less hostile? Can the children sleep? Can I walk without altering my route?

Most answers are affirmative — and rightfully so. That is why prohibition succeeds for women even when it is imperfect, porous, and selectively enforced. It has delivered far more than its critics concede.

For Nitish Kumar, those silences in the eyes of millions of women who voted this year are worth more than any alcohol shop ever earned the state.