punjab

Updated: Apr 17, 2017 21:15 IST

A video going viral on WhatsApp and other social media shows a liquor shop purportedly set up on a tractor-trailer to circumvent the Supreme Court order banning liquor 500 metres along highways.

The man shooting the video speaks in Punjabi, jokes about the order and also, curiously, blames Punjab finance minister Manpreet Singh Badal for it! The exact date and location of the video could not be known, but the trailer has the name of the town Shahbad — purportedly the one in Haryana close to the Punjab border — on a side.

Social activist Harman Singh Sidhu, who was one of the petitioners in the SC for the ban, said he too had seen the video and it did not surprise him. “I had found such ‘theka’ on wheels along the highway in Haryana, close to the Punjab border, in 2013 too. They even advertised that the booze with them was cheaper than that in Punjab. Complaints about these did not yield much result as the officials say they could not find these moving vends.”

Sidhu also shared some pictures (pasted below) that he said were from 2013.