Ahmedabad, July 9 (Inditop.com) The death toll caused by moonshine rose to 84 here Thursday in one of Gujarat’s worst such tragedies, as the opposition denounced the government over the deaths in a state where consumption and sale of liquor is officially banned.
Nearly 170 people were still warded in four hospitals of Ahmedabad, some in critical condition, authorities said. From the time people began dying Monday, the number of fatalities has mounted rapidly.
An embarrassed Gujarat government has asked its Principal Secretary (Health) Amarjit Singh to personally supervise the treatment of patients in the Civil Hospital, Shardaben Hospital, LG Hospital and VS Hospital.
A Congress-sponsored general strike evoked only a partial response in the areas of Odhav, Amraiwadi and Nikol in eastern Ahmedabad. Congress workers asked traders doing business to close their shops.
All three areas are thickly populated and are home to numerous small scale industries that employ thousands of labourers.
Gujarat is the country’s only state where sale and consumption of liquor is banned in deference to Mahatma Gandhi, a Gujarati who was passionately opposed to liquor.
This has led to a proliferation of illegal liquor dens, whose home-made brew is mostly consumed by those from low income families who can’t afford high priced drinks available outside the state.
The tragedy has led to the arrest of Harishankar Kahar alias Hari, a notorious player in the state’s illegal liquor industry. He was detained by the Crime Branch Wednesday night.
But police sources say they don’t know who was the original supplier of the killer drink.
“We have nabbed the key suspect and he is cooperating with the investigation,” a police officer said. “But he has not revealed anything about the original supplier of the killer brew.”
He said Kahar was arrested from Odhav locality and claimed that “raids conducted at his den have resulted in hundreds of litres of country liquor getting seized”.
These had been reportedly stored in a number of containers.
Similar raids against liquor dens are going on in south Gujarat as well as districts bordering Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
The government has announced a four-member commission headed by a former Gujarat High Court judge to probe the tragedy. It will submit its findings by Nov 30.
“The leads being provided by Kahar could prove useful to track the network of bootleggers in Gujarat,” the Crime Branch official said.
“However, the scale of the tragedy in Ahmedabad will now make us look for dens which have been activated after the Lok Sabha elections in the interior parts of the state.”
In Gandhinagar, the Gujarat assembly witnessed uproarious scenes, forcing Speaker Ashok Bhatt to suspend all the Congress legislators except the leader of the opposition Shaktisinh Gohil for disrupting the session over the liquor tragedy.
