A false step

When is a dance bar not a dance bar? When can it pass for a club, a pub, a tourism-related show, any other place that allows singing and dan...

When is a dance bar not a dance bar? When can it pass for a club, a pub, a tourism-related show, any other place that allows singing and dancing? In Mumbai, those are the absurd questions now after the Maharashtra cabinet has approved the Bombay Police Amendment Ordinance 2005. The ordinance puts the official impress on a ban that is being looked upon by Mumbai8217;s well-wishers as a tipping point in the city8217;s career. It isn8217;t just that the shutdown defies common sense and will be hugely difficult, and actually impossible, to implement. It is, more poignantly, that it is a Talibanesque statement of intent issued by the ruling coalition that has the power to misshape the future of one of India8217;s most modern of cities.

Ever since Home Minister R.R. Patil first announced his little conservative fantasy that is now gone mad, it has been obvious that the official reasons were only meant to dress up a truly regressive politics. Banning dance bars cannot be the solution to either corruption or criminality. A ban will only drive the business underground, which will increase the already hefty rates that policemen currently charge from dance bar owners. As for criminals, they can as well patronise five-star establishments, which have been left out of the ban8217;s ambit. If the impetus is the government8217;s heart bleeding for those forced into prostitution, the thing to do, surely, is to address it directly. Why the prevarication by the Maharashtra government, why this detour from the brothel to the dance bar? On those other noble concerns that Minister Patil has also expressed 8212; that have to do with the imperilled morals of Mumbaikars urgently in need of rescuing 8212; it is surely ironic that a state that is unable to provide its citizenry with an assured power supply should try so assiduously to mind their morals.

It is precisely this inability of the state to meet the challenge posed by its own dwindling capacities in Maharashtra that fuels the current morality play in Mumbai. It is the state8217;s abject unwillingness to take charge of what it can and to cut the red tape in what is better parcelled out to private players, that has prodded the Congress-NCP government to come up with this cocktail of family values, dance girls and, yes, national security 8212; that last being the cynical attempt to politically encash the Bangladesh bogey once more. At the end of it, picture this: India8217;s financial capital is now to be the city of stilled infrastructure projects and a hyperactive government that tells its citizens where they cannot dance.