WHAT is a bigger threat than war, civil unrest or natural disaster? For Indian businesses there is an obvious answer: government. Consider the past few months. In November the central government scrapped 86% of paper currency, pitching citizens into a mad scramble to find alternative ways to buy, sell and get paid. In March it slipped a new rule into the annual budget bill that frees taxmen to raid or seize any property at any time with no need to explain why.

Sometimes it is particular industries that get bashed. Politicians keen to impress voters with their devotion to cows, for instance, are making life hard for producers of meat (meaning mostly buffalo), including exporters who earn India around $4bn a year. Some state governments turn a blind eye to vigilantes such as those who beat a (licensed) Muslim dairy farmer to death in Rajasthan last week; others have encouraged hyper-zealous “inspections”, followed by closures, of slaughterhouses.

This week two bigger industries have found themselves hit by another bit of the government, India’s Supreme Court. Its judges not only upheld an earlier decision to deny licences to sell alcohol within 500 metres of a state or national highway; they also extended it from retail outlets to embrace any place serving alcohol, be it a bar, restaurant, hotel or club. In a country that suffers 400 traffic deaths a day, the need to curb drunk driving is clear. But this step by the court into the realm of rule-making, which in most countries is the job of legislators, has had jarring effects.

To India’s liquor and hospitality industries, the shock has been cataclysmic. “Nationwide we are talking about closing 100,000 outlets and losing a million jobs,” says Dilip Datwani, a Mumbai hotel-owner and top executive in both regional and national hotel and restaurant associations. In the state of Maharashtra alone some 16,000 out of 26,000 licensed premises lie within 500 metres of a highway. This includes not just roadside booze shacks but some of India’s poshest hotels. Not only can they no longer sell alcohol; they must forfeit all the liquor they had in stock.

“Being on the main road was a big plus, and now suddenly it’s a liability,” protests the owner of a resort south of Mumbai who reckons that alcohol sales make up around 10% of her revenues. “It’s not that drinking is the epicentre of the experience we offer, but if you can’t offer it clients will just go elsewhere.” Gallingly she, like many others in Maharashtra, had renewed her very costly annual alcohol licence hours before the court ruling rendered it void. Mr Datwani, for his part, notes that the highway by which one of his hotels stands was not designated “national” until a decade after he built it.

This time, however, business owners have an unexpected ally: state governments. Many rely on liquor taxes for a big chunk of revenue. Estimates of their potential loss this year alone range from $15bn to $30bn. And so, while some liquor outlets are applying the ancient Indian science of jugaad (work-around), such as by diverting motorists to a rear entrance that happens to be more than 500 metres from the highway, governments are proving ingenious too. The favoured trick so far has been to change the signposts, so that state highways magically become district or municipal roads. Rajasthan, for instance, has already “denotified” 125km of state highway. As one tweet quipped, perhaps the rules should now read, “No road shall be classified as a highway within 500m of a bar.”