Let’s dance again

Let’s dance again

Stop moral policing in Mumbai.

The state should not thrust its notion of morality upon society. This lies at the heart of the Supreme Court setting aside almost all of Maharashtra’s stringent conditions for licensing dance bars. Successive state governments have actually been defying court rulings since 2005. Repeated rulings to revive dance bars in Mumbai have been circumvented. But the state must finally see sense. The ban was wrong-headed even one and half decades ago. In the interim social norms have only become more liberal and diverse.

Consider how the assembly debated the ban before pushing it through in the first place: one legislator suggested it was better for a woman to commit suicide than dance in bars, while another argued that all dancing except Bharatnatyam and Kathak was vulgar and should be banned. Informed as it was by such extraordinary logic, the ban only hurt the interests of working women in the name of protecting them. One study at the time indicated that 60% of the dancers were sole breadwinners for their families. Many of them may have been pushed into penury and prostitution when their work was capriciously reclassified by predominantly male legislators as illegal.

Rights and livelihoods are whimsically sacrificed at the altar of lawmakers’ morality every time they ban alcohol, foods, films or whatever else they don’t fancy. Only mai-baap sarkar – which treats citizens as childlike wards of the state – is strengthened. In quashing Maharashtra’s efforts to repress dance bars by such regulations as requiring CCTVs inside the bars (which amounts to invasion of privacy) or licence-seekers of ‘good character’ (which is vague and liable to breed corruption), the apex court drew attention to the arbitrary and unreasonable nature of the state’s actions. It is those state actions that are obscene, not dance bars.