‘Vulgarity is what you can’t see with your family’

• What went wrong with your insistence on the ban?

Nothing has gone wrong. The state Advocate-General, the Law and Judiciary departments, legal luminaries whom we’d consulted and myself still believe in the bills content and it’s framing. In fact that’s why we have decided to doggedly pursue it in the Supreme Court. I believe we can convince the court.

• Isn’t the High Court verdict a personal defeat for you?

There is nothing personal in a democracy. The bill proposing the ban was framed in the State Assembly, with the consent of all 288 legislators of all the parties. R R Patil is incidental in this story. The state cabinet had in fact discussed and debated it and then passed the bill.

• Didn’t you hurry through the dance bar bill?

No, our legal department took two months to draft the bill, we held seven long meetings with legal experts, the bill was discussed for two continuous day in the Legislative Assembly, how can you call this hurry?

• Dances are allowed in Mumbai’s five-star hotels, so why this discrimination against dance bars?

We targeted dance bars because they were confirmed sources of criminalization and corruption. Interestingly, police officers asked for duties in and around notorious dance bars, as this helps them to ‘‘flourish’’. Simultaneously from the very beginning dance bars were more defiant as opposed to five-star hotels. In the past five years, six five-star hotels were given the license for dance shows, as against 304 dance bars in that span. There was not a single complaint registered against five star hotels, whereas more than 23,000 complaints registered against dance bars for breaking the law.

• You’ve said that the ban on dance bars has reduced crime in the city. Is there any data on this?

Not only crime but also drunken driving and resultant accidents were considerably reduced after the ban. It was published in the newspapers that many youngsters from good families involved in dacoity, theft and murder were regular bar visitors. So the ban did serve a social purpose.

... contd.