Pune's hotel and wine shop owners got most of their festival business back on Friday, courtesy a sharp word from the Bombay High Court.

The Pune Collector had ordered a blanket ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol for all 10 days of Ganeshotsav, which begins September 14. Associations representing hotel and wine shop owners challenged that order, and a bench of Chief Justice M C Tripathi and Justice Advait Sethna wasn't having it. Why, the judges wanted to know, was Pune being singled out when Mumbai and every other district in Maharashtra faced no such restriction.

"What is the rationale behind choosing only Pune? We deprecate such practice. This is a stigma on Pune residents. What are you trying to portray, that only people in Pune behave badly after drinking? One district you are choosing across the state," the bench said, according to the Free Press Journal.

The court didn't dispute that authorities have a job to do keeping order during a festival that draws lakhs onto the streets for processions and visarjan. But a 10-day shutdown for every licensed bar and shop in the district was, in the judges' view, punishing an entire population for the conduct of a few. Not everyone who drinks ends up causing trouble on the road, the bench pointed out.

Chief Justice Tripathi wasn't above a joke about it either. He warned that habitual drinkers cut off for 10 straight days "will flood hospitals if they don't get to drink," and flagged the dent a long dry spell would put in the state excise department's revenue.

The climbdown

Faced with the bench's questioning, the state didn't wait for a formal order. Additional Government Pleader Kedar Dighe told the court in the afternoon session that the prohibition had already been trimmed down substantially. Under the revised plan, alcohol sale and consumption will be barred only until 4 pm on September 14, the festival's opening day, and through September 25, the final day of immersion, which was already marked as a dry day on the calendar regardless of Ganeshotsav.

The court accepted that undertaking and told the Collector to issue a fresh order spelling out the reduced restriction. So instead of a 10-day dry run, Pune's bars and wine shops lose roughly a day and a half of trade, bookended around the festival's busiest stretch.

It's a fairly narrow legal dispute on paper, licence holders wanting to keep their shutters up, but the bench's framing turned it into something sharper: a question about whether one city can be treated as more prone to disorder than the rest of the state without any data to back that up. The Collector's fresh order is now expected before September 14 rolls around.