Akhand Anand!

This post has nothing to do with that fine Gujarati monthly magazine, Akhand Anand, published since 1947 from Ahmedabad, and subscribed to by most Gujarati homes till at least a couple of decades back. I used to borrow it from our neighbor, I remember, when in college. I guess it is still being printed.  

This post has to do with a stupidly sad event that took place one winter evening in 2016 at a place called Akhand Farm, on the outskirts of my small town. That evening dramatically changed the way my small town henceforth celebrated festivals, birthdays, engagements, weddings, anniversaries, get-togethers, what-have-you, that would include more than half a dozen invitees. Diu and Daman, Mount Abu and Udaipur, across the border and within easy motorable distance, benefitted hugely (and continue to) the most from the Akhand fallout, and hostelries in these places quickly geared themselves up to host the well-heeled guests in a merry-making mood from their neighbouring state.

What happened at Akhand Farm was extremely regrettable but not entirely unexpected. We live in a Prohibition state. That is, since Independence, Gujarat being the birth-state of Bapu who abhorred alcohol or rather the unfortunate consequences of alcoholism on poor families, the Government of India has declared Gujarat to have nothing to do with alcohol, with its consumption being a legal offence. We’ve lived with that (and continue to do so) for the last eight decades, and things are not going to change in the future in any drastic manner. So, in their own way, the locals have found ways (never easy) to reach out to their regular chhota the best they can.

Well, many times before, in my small town, but on a much, much smaller scale, the Akhand Farm scenario has been played out in people’s homes, sometimes in their farm-houses. Usually the son-of-a-gun who tattles, often via an anonymous phone call to the police, is a disgruntled frenemy not invited to the party, or an irritated neighbor harassed by too much noise or too many cars blocking the parking, or, the worst of them all – an offended business/professional rival waiting for an opportunity to settle scores. The thing is, once the police get this phone call/complaint, they have no choice but to reach the place and take it from there. If the host is unwilling to cough up the cash demanded by the uniformed powers-that-be, then the supposed merrymakers would be hauled up in the SSG hospital for blood-sample taking, and for a smaller exchange of the baksheesh, a pliable paramedic would do the necessary golmaal with the samples. Generally, all would be forgiven and forgotten, and everyone would go home in the early hours of the following day except that the local media would hype this up for a couple of more days; those who knew the host and were not invited would go around with a supercilious ‘I told you this would happen’ look; and those who were caught would either guffaw with embarrassment or a hota hai, hota hai attitude, depending on their temperament. And life would go on.

Nobody is really bothered about these things nor cares any longer, but let me assure you, for some strange reason which I cannot fathom, they are not easily forgotten. Also somehow, doctors, poor souls, who get ‘caught’ in these situations, get whacked with the dirtiest end of the stick! Only last week I was visiting a hospitalized relative, and sharing the lift on my way out, was an elderly nurse. In a bid to make small talk, I asked her about a doctor-friend who was quite popular in that hospital but had left my small town for better prospects in Australia more than three decades back. While she certainly remembered who I was referring to and said what a shame it was for the hospital to have lost him to pardes and all that, she could not help asking me if it was the same person who was caught in the (wink wink) dhamaal in Pratap Gunj many years back. Gosh, you could’ve knocked me down with a feather!

However, the Akhand raid left everyone (including most of us who did not even know the host family) with a bad taste in the mouth and ugly, angry thoughts in the head. Nobody in my small town could be capable of such base nastiness, I had felt then. After all the family was celebrating an engagement, leave them alone, let them have a good time, what’s the big deal. Instead, most of the family (including the elderly grandparents), relatives and friends (about 350+) were lined up in police vans and taken for blood samples, with huffing and puffing media persons hot on their heels, their unhappy, furious pictures splashed across meters of newsprint and several minutes of TV time over many days, spiced by ridiculous allegations of fatuous behavior, and completely unwarranted speculations on who could have sneaked out as the whiff of a possible raid burst open, and those who were invited but had not reached the venue by the time the raid went into operation.

The harshness and the deliberate viciousness that was displayed by the authorities and the media was something that took the entire city by an unpleasant surprise. Granted that the guests and hosts had messed with the law and were certainly in the wrong. But this was taking things way too far. As if the ignominy of being herded in the police van, queueing up at the public hospital, and continuously being in the media was not punishment enough, the list of ALL those who were held as accused were distributed to the few official liquor shops in my small town where those with valid permits were allowed to buy their rationed quota every month. So if anyone of the ‘accused’ with a liquor permit that needed to be renewed, applied for the same, this list was checked if the name appeared on it and then obviously the permit was not renewed. I am told, though I am not very certain, that this list was also distributed to airport officials in Ahmedabad in case any of the ‘accused’ was trying to get in a bottle or two. And so ‘Akhand accused’ became an unfortunate and shameful tag that none of them (even the more than 150 who had not touched liquor that evening or were teetotalers) were allowed to forget.

So it was with a vengeance that I greeted the news when just last week, eight years after the event, that the Vadodara Judicial Magistrate (first class) acquitted all the accused (actually 129 charge-sheeted persons) stating that the evidence presented ‘does not exclude all reasonable possibilities of innocence’ to declare them guilty. (Indian Express, August 10, 2024). The court observed, ‘the current case is precarious, teetering between justice and injustice, due to deficiencies in the investigation’, adding that the prosecution had failed to prove the charges under the Prohibition Act. In fact, one wonders if the authorities even know how to go about its work since the Court pulled up the Investigating Officer (IO) saying, “… the IO has not done any investigation regarding the fact that permit holders came to the Farm after (consuming) alcohol from their residence … the case of the prosecution is not that the permit holder was drinking alcohol when they reached the spot … it is the prosecution’s case that at the spot of the incident, liquor has been recovered and some persons have been found in a state of intoxication. A permit holder who took an intoxicant … goes with driver to attend any function, cannot be said to be in breach of permit.”

Picking even larger holes in the police investigation, the Court said that none of the police personnel involved in the raid had received ‘official instructions’ from the then DySP and ‘no movement of any police officer was recorded in the station diary register’. It noted that the officer who received the tip-off has admitted that the ‘information received is not recorded anywhere, that he investigated in his secret way and did not seem to have jotted down any notes while he was present on the spot during the raid’.

Seriously? Why make such a tamasha if you were not going do your job thoroughly and efficiently? This case could very well make it to the annals of police history -- for more reasons than one.

Finally, Akhand Anand for all the guests and hosts of that unfortunate evening.