Photograph by Olivier Matthys
In Lahore’s Walled City, next to a bookstore selling Islamic texts is a small and grimy recycling shop that sells empty bottles of imported and locally made beer, whiskey, and vodka. Collected from garbage heaps across the city and sold to the shop by young Afghan children, these bottles have kept the storeowners in business for at least 25 years. Over the past two, things have picked up. “Most of our sales are to art students and to glassmakers,” says the owner of the family-run business, who did not wish to be named. “There are a lot more bottles coming to us these days,” he says. “I guess people are drinking more.”
For Isphanyar Bhandara, this is welcome news. In his office in Rawalpindi, the shelf behind his 100-year-old teak desk is lined with his family business’s products: bottles of beer, whiskey, gin, and vodka. These bottles are not empty. “Alcohol is a very touchy subject,” says Bhandara, 37, who runs Murree Brewery, Pakistan’s oldest and largest distillery and brewery. “The less publicity it gets the better.”
Bhandara, who became chief executive of the company after his father Minocher Bhandara’s death two years ago, has cause for concern given Pakistan’s stormy relationship with alcohol. Alcohol had been available openly and freely until 1977, when then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto banned its production and sale as sop to the religious right wing. It took a military coup and six years to rescue the country’s small but robust booze sector. Bhutto’s Islamist successor, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, in whose government Bhandara’s late father served, allowed manufacturing to restart but limited sales to Pakistan’s non-Muslim population. “My father managed to convince [Haq] to relax the ban and allow us to continue our business,” says Bhandara. “It wasn’t easy.”
Over the last decade, business has boomed. Murree Brewery made a pretax profit of about Rs. 308 million in the financial year that ended on June 30, 2008. The following year, this improved by another Rs. 72 million. Quetta Distillery, the second-largest of the country’s three distilleries, has also seen an uptick in sales over the last two years. Quetta’s owner Nelofur Abadan says there has been “significant improvement” in profits, but declined to give specifics. “I only own a distillery, so I’m not able to make beer, which is what a lot of people in Pakistan seem to enjoy,” she told Newsweek Pakistan. “If I could set up a brewery, I think I would be able to give Murree Brewery a run for their money.”
It’s not just non-Muslims who are driving profits lately for the distillers. “The upper and lower classes are the greatest consumers of alcohol,” says Ayesha Farooq, a sociologist at Lahore’s Government College University. “The poor need alcohol to escape the difficulties of their lives, and the rich are bored.” She says the proliferation of cable television channels, which began eight years ago, has exposed Pakistanis to other societies and cultures and may also be a factor.
But increased consumption may also be a sign of economic desperation. “This is to be expected in a society where the middle class has been squeezed,” she says. Research on Indian alcohol consumption conducted by the Datamonitor Group, a market-analysis company, supports Farooq’s analysis. According to the report released last September, alcohol consumption picks up during economic slumps. The global financial crisis of 2008 that also affected Pakistan, paired with the country’s ongoing troubles with suicide attacks and terrorism, may have pushed more Pakistanis toward drink.
Photograph by Olivier Matthys
The pattern of consumption is also widespread, as taxes collected by provincial governments from the alcoholic beverage industry in Pakistan indicate. In the financial year that ended in June, the governments earned some Rs. 3 billion from the licit sale of liquor and beer: Sindh, the home province of President Asif Ali Zardari, racked up Rs. 1.78 billion in taxes; Punjab, the richest and most populous province, earned Rs. 926 million; and Balochistan, the least populated, earned Rs. 118 million. No such figures were provided by the conservative Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, where consumption exists but is not officially acknowledged or taxed.
Because drinking is considered taboo and done behind closed doors, actual consumption is likely higher than suggested by official tax receipts. It can often also be lethal. Sale of moonshine to lower-income groups in Pakistan—on occasions like the kite-flying festival of Basant in the Punjab—remains unregulated. Reports of death from the consumption of cheap, spurious liquor appear almost every month in the press—two people died in Sindh’s Mirwah Gorchani on Sept. 14.
Murree Brewery’s Bhandara says this can be set right. “This can easily be prevented if only the government would allow us to open sanctioned outlets in rural areas,” he says. Sindh has 95 shops where liquor is legally sold. In this instance, the government may not be the problem. Last July, the religious political party Jamaat-e-Islami took to the streets protesting against the Sindh government’s decision to issue 22 fresh permits for liquor shops. A spokesman for Sindh’s chief minister told Newsweek Pakistan that only two of those licenses have been issued.
The business of booze is riddled with instability in Pakistan. In order to attain economic security, distillers have long sought to regain access to foreign markets. “We used to supply a lot of countries, including India and Afghanistan, with our beer and liquor,” says Bhandara. Prohibition put an end to exports—and to sales to their largest customer, Pakistan’s Army. (Murree Brewery was originally established to supply British soldiers with locally brewed beer.) Last year, the federal Council of Islamic Ideology reaffirmed that exports would sully the reputation of the Islamic republic and could not be allowed. Today, Pakistan exports only industrial alcohol.
Prohibition forced Murree Brewery to diversify into glassmaking and nonalcoholic drinks, a venture that remains unprofitable. But Bhandara knows the real money is in booze. For years, Bhandara’s family has been working on a proposal to co-brew beer with Carlsberg of Denmark and Foster’s of Australia. “We would brew their beers in Pakistan and they would brew ours for the U.K. and Europe markets,” says Bhandara. “My father was always fighting for the alcohol industry in Pakistan,” he says. “I am also trying the same.”