Food bans seem to be a theme for 2015. Some are sweeping like Maharashtra’s beef ban or the nationwide ban on Maggi, some specific like Madhya Pradesh’s ban on eggs in midday meal schemes and some local like the housing society in Mumbai alleged to be boycotting a family over cooking meat. Everywhere it seems people are stopping others from eating something.It rarely comes out well. Banning something so basic makes people resentful, defiantly pushing them to eat what they might have avoided voluntarily. Bans tend to lack practical logic — they are imposed precisely because what they require isn’t what people would do normally. But since their perpetrators never admit to the prejudices underlying most bans, they invent twisted justifications that can be as damaging as the ban.50 years ago, a particularly startling ban was imposed, and had lasting consequences. Bans are rarely imposed on popular foods, especially those seen as emblematic of a community. And few foods are more emblematic of Bengal than sweets based on channa (split milk solids) like sandesh and rosogollas. Yet on August 23, 1965 such milk sweets were banned in Calcutta under the West Bengal Channa Sweets Control Order imposed by Congress chief minister Prafulla Chandra Sen.Sen justified his action by pointing to the dire situation of dairying in the state. In a speech in Bengali on All India Radio (AIR), he noted: “Whereas the daily per capita of supply of milk in the Punjab is 17 ounces and in Bihar 4 ounces, in West Bengal it is even less than 3 ounces per capita.” Despite Bengal’s historical reputation as a land of milk and honey, it has always lagged in milk production in recent times. Across the border in Bangladesh shortages are still so bad that chaiwallahs use milk substitutes made of imported palm oil and milk powder.Imported milk powder was important in West Bengal then too, but as Sen noted, India’s deteriorating financial situation — the rupee would be devalued in 1966 — made imports increasingly costly. Sen wanted, rightly, the scarce milk to go first to children and mothers, but solutions like taxing channa or offering subsidised milk to the most needy could have been tried. Instead, he went straight for a ban on channa in Calcutta and neighbouring areas, with the possibility of extending it state wide.Sen was an upright, committed man who the current CM Mamata Banerjee , in her memoirs, claims as her mentor, though she is too politically savvy to try a ban on Bengali sweets. Sen had been a freedom fighter and then minister of food in the first government of independent Bengal right until he took over as CM.And as Joya Chatterji points out in her book Spoils of Partition: Bengal & India 1947-1967, he had the vivid experience of the disastrous Bengal famine, when the previous Muslim League government had tried and failed to impose controls on food movements.Yet, faced with two years of failed monsoons and rising prices, Sen panicked and imposed a wide range of controls from curbs on grain trade to restrictions on wedding feasts. “These measures had not worked in in 1943; in the crisis on 1966, they were as ineffectual as they had been during the famine,” writes Chatterji. Powerful traders hoarded or smuggled food to Bihar or East Pakistan while the burden was felt by “traders in foodstuffs, ration shop licensees, rice millers and transporters on whose support the Congress regime in West Bengal had increasingly come to depend.” Sen’s policies destroyed his party’s base.Sen had not counted the effects, both psychological and practical, of the sweets ban. He was an austere Gandhian who possibly saw sweets as inessential luxuries.But for ordinary people, small things like sweets helped ease the problems of daily life and their absence symbolised the failure of the state. Mani Shankar Mukherjee, the popular Bengali novelist who writes as Sankar, says that the ban went against the mood and culture of Bengali people: “The measures may have had merit but the costs of implementation were huge — thousands of people lost out, several sweet businesses had to be shut down and people still consumed milk sweets in the black market whose price was exorbitantly high.”For those in the industry, it was a dark time. “The backbone of Bengal’s sweet industry was broken then,” says Dhiman Das, executive director at the legendary firm KC Das, which claims its founder Nobin Chandra Das invented rosogolla in 1868. Dhiman Das is the fifth generation of the family and he recalls, “We had to sell ornaments of our family and took loans from bank to survive.” As with other famous shops, like Balaram Mullick & Radharaman Mullick, Bhim Chandra Nag and Sen Mahasay, KC Das had to close outlets across the city, leaving only their main branch at Esplanade, which survived by selling other snacks.Sen encouraged this. “We should bear in mind that all these sweetmeat shops prepare salted variety of edibles, such as nimki, singhara, radhaballavi, luchi dalpuri, kachuri, jhuribhaja, alurdom, curry, dal, etc,” he said in that AIR speech. And he promised extra supplies of sugar and flour to make non-milk sweets. This, he felt, countered the charge that 39,000 employees across 8,000 shops were facing retrenchment.But as Sudip Mullick, proprietor of Balaram Mullick & Radharaman Mullick, a fourth generation member of the founder family, points out, for shops to suddenly shift from their core focus was not easy.“Our entire family, including my grandmother and father, had to literally jump into the action to come up with new sweets based on besan, maida, kaju and other materials since our artisans only knew how to make rosogolla and sandesh, which are all milk products,” he says. Some sweet shops took more direct action and challenged the channa control order in the Calcutta High Court , which duly struck it down on November 16, 1965. Enraged, Sen passed the even more sweeping West Bengal Milk Products Control Order just two days later.This was also immediately challenged in court, and it was on November 25, while the verdict was being deliberated that Sen delivered his speech on AIR where, in addition to explaining why the measure was needed and what relief could be given, he also let his emotions get the better of him.In the current situation, he said, making food with milk in West Bengal was tantamount to a crime, and those resisting the order were acting against public interest.Today, when politicians froth at each other on night time TV and make extreme statements as a matter of course, this might not seem shocking. But at that time, and perhaps also reflecting the general irritation that Sen’s bans had caused, his statements became a matter for a court case. Justice BN Banerjee of the Calcutta High Court delivered a lengthy opinion in March 1966 on whether Sen had committed contempt of court by delivering such statements while the second order was being decided by the court.And in a narrow decision — after many pages looking in disfavour at the government’s conduct — Justice Banerjee decided that there was contempt, but he allowed “the contemnor did not ‘anticipate’ his speech might be contumacious or might tend to become one,” and let the government off with a warning. This upset Sen so much that he appealed to the Supreme Court , where he had no luck either.In 1968, in a verdict still cited in contempt of court cases, Justices J Shah , V Ramaswamy and A Grover ruled that “the speech was ex facie calculated to interfere with the administration of justice” and denied the appeal.By then Sen was no longer chief minister. In the year following the sweets ban, the situation in West Bengal had deteriorated hugely, with the Communists capitalising on the discontent caused by the bans to foment riots and strikes. Seeing the reaction at the grassroots, several Congressmen lead by Ajoy Mukherjee left to form the Bangla Congress which managed to come to power in the 1967 elections, with support from the Communists and Muslims. But it was an unstable pact, with the Communists openly manoeuvring to gain power which lead to several periods of President’s Rule. The Congress would try to regain ground under SS Ray, but the drift away could not to be stopped, and finally in 1977, the Left Front took power and stayed in office for 34 years. Sen’s sweet order was not the only cause for the Congress collapse in West Bengal, but it remained a bitter memory of the problems of their rule.The ban had one positive consequence. Bengali sweet makers realised they had to look beyond the state for milk supply and markets without the fear of bans. In the early 1970s, KC Das set up its first store outside Calcutta in the centre of Bangalore, at the juncture of Church Street and St. Mark’s Road. “The government eventually changed power in West Bengal, but the fear had persisted in the industry what if it comes back, so we had to move out to newer markets,” said Das.Thousands of customers were introduced to the joys of mishti dhoi at the Bangalore outlet, and they, at least, might find something to commemorate on the 50th anniversary of Sen’s misguided food ban.