Policing the Alcohol Prohibition: An Analysis of Enforcement Powers, Over-Criminalization, And Constitutional Burdens on India’s Criminal Justice System

Abstract

The current paper is a purely doctrinal overview of the alcohol prohibition laws in India with a focus on the police powers legal architecture of the prohibition, the criminalisation standard and the procedural safeguards of the Constitution. Although Article 47 requires the State to make a good-faith effort to ban intoxicating beverages, the form of legislative and enforcement structure embraced in such states as Bihar and Gujarat has raised the most fundamental constitutional compatibility question. The design of prohibition offences in statutes, broad granting of search, seizure, and arrest authority to the police, reduction of the mens rea threshold, and the introduction of the strict-liability type offences are all critiqued in the paper. Through the critical analysis of the constitutional clauses in Articles 14, 19, 21, and 22, judicial review by the Supreme Court and different High Courts, the paper evaluates whether prohibition policing contributes to the disproportionate liberty and procedural fairness limitations. The question of whether the classification of a minor consumption offence as cognizable but not bailable leads to over-criminalisation, over-delegation and breach of established criminal jurisprudential principles is discussed further. The paper will end by concluding that the present condition of the legal system is too burdensome to criminal justice, contrary to the principle of proportionality, and requires a doctrinal correction of prohibition policing to fit within constitutional morality and the modern criminal law theory.