At least eighteen people are dead. More are in critical condition at Sassoon Hospital in Pune. The poison that killed them was not some exotic substance — it was methanol, a cheap industrial alcohol that illicit liquor makers use to bulk up their product and that the human body converts, in lethal stages, into formaldehyde and formic acid. The victims were mostly poor men from slum settlements in Hadapsar and Dapodi, buying the cheapest thing available because the legal alternative was priced out of their lives. That is the story the suspensions and the political theatre are working hard to bury.

The liquor moved through a network of small slum-based shops, the kind of informal retail that operates in plain sight across Maharashtra's urban periphery. One of those shops, in a Hadapsar slum, has now been identified by investigators as a distribution point for the batch that caused the deaths. Within hours of that identification becoming public, Nationalist Congress Party (SP) leader Rohit Pawar arrived at the shop with a group of party workers. What followed was not a citizens' arrest or a handover to law enforcement — it was a ransacking. Shelves cleared, property destroyed, cameras rolling.

Parawar had earlier visited the families of the deceased and the wards at Sassoon where survivors were being treated, some with permanent vision damage — a signature injury of methanol poisoning. The hospital visits were sombre and legitimate. The slum shop demolition was something else: a performance of outrage in a place where the state had already failed, staged for an audience that is rightly angry and easily directed. It is worth asking what evidence, if any, was destroyed along with the shelving.

The Maharashtra government's response has followed the familiar post-tragedy script with unusual speed, which is itself a signal of how politically exposed this situation is. By Friday, at least twenty-two police and excise personnel across Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad had been suspended or faced suspension proceedings — five police officers, thirteen excise officials, and further action still being announced. The Criminal Investigation Department has been handed the probe, a step that at least nominally removes it from the local apparatus whose failure is under scrutiny.

Those suspensions, while necessary, raise an obvious question: how does a methanol supply chain reach consumers across two major urban jurisdictions without excise officials noticing, unless those officials had reason not to look? Illicit liquor in Maharashtra does not appear spontaneously. It requires procurement of raw materials, production or transport infrastructure, and retail distribution. Each node in that chain is a point where a bribe changes hands or a blind eye is formally institutionalised. The suspensions name individuals; they do not yet answer the structural question.

One detail in the emerging record carries particular weight: the vendor identified as having sold the toxic batch was himself among those who died. That fact collapses the easy narrative of a knowing poisoner preying on victims — the man at the retail end was as much inside the consumption chain as the people he served, almost certainly unaware of the methanol concentration in what he was selling. The actual decision-making about what went into that liquor happened somewhere further up the supply chain, in a location and at a level of organisation that a ransacked slum shop tells us nothing about.

Methanol contamination in illicit liquor is not an accident of chemistry; it is the predictable result of a legal alcohol market in Maharashtra that taxes legitimate spirits at rates that make bootleg product the only affordable option for large sections of the working poor. The state government both created that market and deployed the enforcement apparatus that was supposed to suppress it. When both sides of that equation fail simultaneously — high legal prices intact, enforcement compromised — people die in slums in Hadapsar. This has happened before in Maharashtra. It will happen again unless the economics, not just the officials, are changed.

The CID investigation will produce arrests. Some of them may even reach the middle layers of the supply network. What the investigation will almost certainly not do, if past Maharashtra hooch cases are any guide, is produce a prosecutable chain of evidence connecting illicit production to the specific officers who enabled it, or to any political figure whose constituency the bootleg trade served. In that vacuum, a politician with a camera crew and a willing crowd will always find a shop to ransack — and a news cycle to own.