Jakarta – For a country with the world's largest population of Muslims, Indonesia is remarkably permissive. Night spots in Jakarta, the capital, and on the resort island of Bali can be raunchy places. It reflects Indonesia's traditionally tolerant teaching of Islam, which rejects fundamentalist interpretations of the Koran for more flexible ones, as well as the presence of large Buddhist, Christian and Hindu minorities. Yet lately some Muslim groups have become more assertive in pushing an Islamist agenda. One of the ways they are doing so is by seeking to impose a national ban on alcohol.

Two Muslim parties in parliament, the National Development Party (PPP) and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), are proposing legislation that would criminalise the production, distribution and consumption of alcoholic drinks. Anyone caught drinking alcohol could face two years in prison, while those making it or selling it would be put away for ten years. Debates over the proposed law follow a separate government regulation, which took effect in April 2015, banning the sale of beer at the small shops where most Indonesians buy their groceries. The government minister responsible has been sacked, but his ban remains in place. It led to a 13% slide in sales in 2015, according to Euromonitor, a research firm. Most of Indonesia's Muslims are moderate and are not clamouring for prohibition. Alcohol has been produced and consumed in the archipelago for at least 700 years.

Indonesia's Islamists have traditionally pressed for restrictions on alcohol, as well as other activities of which they disapprove, as part of sharia-inspired campaigns against immorality. In the case of the booze ban, however, they are also citing health reasons. Alcohol, they say, causes hundreds of deaths as well as mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. But Indonesians are actually very abstemious: they consume less than one litre of alcohol per head annually. Unlicensed home-brews, known as oplosan, are responsible for nearly all alcohol-related deaths in Indonesia. Produced on a mass scale, sometimes using non-food ingredients such as methanol, these account for more than 80% of the alcohol consumed in Indonesia. Unlike licensed products, which are unaffordable for many people, not least because of a stiff sales tax, opsolan are sold cheaply – often in corners of the country where local authorities have restricted the alcohol trade under powers devolved to them since decentralisation in 2001.

Aside from the risks of boosting the blackmarket trade in unlicensed booze, turning Indonesia dry would be seen by many as an affront to the cultural diversity of the archipelago. Fortunately for Indonesia's tipplers – and this includes many of its Muslims – a national ban looks unlikely. Muslim parties control less than one-third of the seats in parliament. The government, for its part, is proposing far more limited legislation intended, among other things, to curb consumption of toxic oplosan. That is something many Indonesians would support.

Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/01/economist-explains-5