Bal Gangadhar Tilak worked for prohibition in the country. It does not mean that he was a pigheaded orthodox bigot. He was compelled to adopt that posture due to the circumstances. The social condition had become so horrendous that the poor were killing themselves by drinking out of sheer frustration of the situation which allowed them no ray of hope. For them there was darkness of hopelessness all around. The poor were able to see some light only by burning themselves via liquor consumption.
The situation was the creation of the collusion between the foreign rulers of British origin and the native feudal lords. He wanted to undo that conspiracy.
There was one more objective. By opening more and more liquor shops in towns and the rural areas administration was encouraging the liquor sales to astronomical levels which was earning the alien rulers money in taxes and revenues in the same upward ratio. Thus, at the expense of the poor masses the rulers were making money which was in turn helping them get entrenched in India and become more and more powerful as it could afford larger police forces and better armed army.
So, Tilak wanted prohibition to cut off the money supply to the alien rulers.
He knew the economic and the political importance his drive against the liquor policy of the government. He stepped hard on it and his prohibition drive resulted in closing down of liquor shops.
The anti-liquor movement was being organised by ‘Temperance Association’. The association was set up by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Krishna Gokhale and they were the supremos of the body. Temperance Association had armies of workers and volunteers. Groups of workers and volunteers used to picket before the liquor shops blocking the path of the buyers. The buyers who came to the shops were requested to give up drinking for their own sake and for their country as well.
Thus, the shops found no buyers and had to close down. The picketing sometimes turned violent when the police and the picketing workers clashed. Several times police lathi charged on the workers or tried to remove the picketers by force.
The Temperance movement severely harmed the financial interests of the rulers as liquor sales dropped sharply and the shops closed one after another.
The British also knew that the real aim of the Tilak’s movement was to financially ruin the government. Tilak had again become a pain in the neck.
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