The other side of morality

With the grossest “item numbers” being staple fare on TV, cyber cafes in Mumbai charging as little as Rs 20 an hour to surf the Net, blue-film parlours sprouting in every small town, every second movie being almost soft porn, and X-rated magazines displayed all over the city after 7 pm, it’s difficult to judge exactly what role dance bars, where customers must spend far more money than on any of the above, play in corrupting Maharashtra’s teenaged boys and male breadwinners. Is it okay to be titillated by crude and graphic images of writhing half-clad women wherever you go, but not okay to actually see them in the flesh?

One of the official reasons for closing down the dance bars is that they are a “front for prostitution”. But prostitution itself is allowed to flourish on Mumbai’s streets by Patil’s corrupt and brutal police force. One of those streets runs just outside Mumbai’s nondescript MLAs’ hostel. Even two decades ago, the quiet of the night would be broken here by the loud abuses of women thrown out after a drunken night’s revelry without being paid what had been promised to them by our elected representatives. Around Mumbai’s landmark Gateway of India, right across the famed Taj Hotel where hordes of policemen protect local and visiting dignitaries, foreign paedophiles prey on Mumbai’s poorest children, scarring them far more seriously than the dancing girls do their young customers. Invariably, these culprits are allowed by Patil’s police to escape the law.

So, are the bar girls just softer targets, especially since a majority of them are said to be from outside Maharashtra?

As dishonest as Patil’s moral hypocrisy is the “liberal” outcry of “Talibanisation of Mumbai”. The Taliban denied Afghan women their basic human right to develop their full potential as human beings through education, the freedom to move and work outside the confines of their home, and to dress as they pleased. At the heart of the Taliban’s moral code, enforced brutally, was the belief that women were lesser beings to be controlled by men, specifically by the Taliban.

The Maharashtra government is denying women the opportunity to pursue the only job they have been able to find which meets their financial needs — dancing suggestively in front of drunken men.

The bar girls may talk contemptuously about the poor ‘bakras’ who can be parted from their money (most of which goes to the bar owner) over and over again with a few seductive tricks, a lingering touch, a sip from their glass… They may boast about their skills at stringing along the persistent types and letting the aggressive louts be dealt with by the seth. But the basis of their job is their ability to please men sexually, without having to sleep with them. The power lies with the men — the bar owner, the customer, the police. A bar girl who reacted in kind to a drunk customer’s abuse had a glass flung at her. Her seth sided with the customer. Bar girls are often attacked by spurned customers on their way home from work after midnight; the police feel they deserve it.

What bar dancers do is neither “fun” nor “sin”. It’s simply survival on terms they didn’t lay down.