Revision summary
Personal drinking meets a limit where crashes, violence, and household ruin harm others. Article 47 supports State action; Article 21 still limits cruel or unequal enforcement. A manifesto ban is democratic collective choice, not a private officer’s taste. Total prohibition needs honest eyes on hooch, police rents, and VIP exceptions. The civil servant implements the law, closes loopholes, and reports new harms upward.
Model answer
Introduction
A fresh mandate has produced a total liquor ban. The ethical question is not whether a manifesto may speak; it is whether the State may enter a habit that many call private, and how a civil servant should implement that entry.
Body
Personal choice and its limits
- Mill’s harm principle allows liberty until the habit harms others: crashes, domestic violence, ruined household budgets, and a public health load are not only private tastes.
- Article 21 protects bodily autonomy; Article 47 asks the State to raise nutrition and to prohibit intoxicating drinks — a Directive Principle, not a fundamental right to a bottle, and not a blank cheque for cruelty in enforcement.
- A democracy may regulate or ban after an election; that is collective choice, not a midnight moral raid without law.
Should the government interfere?
- Interfere, yes, where externalities and addiction capture the weak, especially women and children in a drinking household.
- Interfere as total prohibition only with eyes open: Gujarat and Bihar show illicit trade, hooch deaths, police rents, and lost excise that must be replaced honestly.
- A total ban is a heavy tool. Graduated options exist: dry days, age and outlet limits, advertising bans, treatment, and higher tax. The manifesto chose the heavy tool; ethics still asks whether the means will create a black market that kills the poor with methanol.
- Paternalism toward a peaceful adult drinker is the weakest case; protection of a beaten spouse is the strongest. Policy should be written to the strong case without pretending every sip is a crime of the soul.
Role of the civil servant in this State
- Implement the lawful ban: close licensed shops, publish the order, and refuse a quiet VIP exception that would make the manifesto a lie for the poor only.
- Record and reduce harm: hooch surveillance, treatment beds, livelihood plans for tavern labour, and no communal targeting of a community as “the drinkers”.
- Speak upward with data when deaths or police corruption rise; implementation loyalty is not silence about a killing illicit market.
- Personal disagreement with prohibition does not authorise sabotage of a valid law.
Logical comment
- Government should interfere in alcohol as a public-health and harm problem, not as a theatre of virtue.
- A total ban can be democratically legitimate and still ethically unfinished until enforcement is equal, medically supported, and honest about illicit liquor.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD L[Liberty] --> H[Harm to others] H --> R[Regulate or ban] R --> E[Equal honest enforcement]
Conclusion
Alcohol is not a sealed private room when it injures others. A manifesto ban is a lawful collective choice. The civil servant enforces it without VIP holes, and reports the illicit harm so that interference remains protection, not a new rent.
Quick related
Students also ask
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If I drink privately, has the State no business?
Private use with no other-regarding harm is the strongest liberty claim. A commercial sale ban is about the market and public injury, not only your glass.
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May I, as DM, keep a club open for officers?
A VIP hole would fail equality and make the ban a tax on the poor. Implement as written or seek a lawful, published exception for all, not a mess privilege.
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