RIGHTS

RIGHTS-INDIA: The Final Curtain for Mumbai's Dancing Girls

Click to read article by Flavia Agnes

NEW DELHI, May 5 (IPS) - A ban on girls dancing in western Mumbai's 'dance bars' to entice male patrons to freely part with their money, threatens to destroy about a million livelihoods and along with it a defining feature of the bustling port metropolis -- which many say is a reminder of the seedy side of China's Shanghai city in the 1930s.

On Tuesday, at least 10,000 dance bar girls turned up at a demonstration at Mumbai's Azad Maidan (Freedom Park) -- ringed by the gothic Bombay (old name for Mumbai) High Court and other architectural relics of the British colonial days -- to record their protest against the ban which came into effect last month.

But even that impressive turnout belied the actual numbers that would be made unemployed with the dancing ban. They include at least 80,000 female entertainers and countless waiters, bouncers, bartenders, chefs, janitors and other support staff that are directly or indirectly employed in the licensed business. A conservative estimate puts the number jobless at one million.

Mumbai has more than 700 dance bars where the girls do dance routines timed to numbers churned out by the city's hugely popular film industry. At the same time, they entice their clientele to consume more alcohol and part with their rupee notes in appreciation for the dancing. Some of these bars, like 'Carnival' and 'Topaz', have even earned a mention in the popular 'Lonely Planet' tourist guidebook.

Nonetheless, some of these bars are also noted for their 'extra-curricular' activities for favoured customers - from the ranks of high-level politicians to notorious underworld criminals.

Mumbai's bars remind many of Shanghai's go-go years of the 1930s, when wealthy Chinese landowners fleeing rural unrest mingled with a Westernizing business class to produce a unique urban Shanghai culture. The dark side of the ensuing prosperity was a festering underworld of drugs, gambling and prostitution.

Little wonder then that when conservative groups clamoured for their shutdown claiming these bars were breeding grounds for crime and prostitution, the authorities in Maharashtra state decided to act.

But the dance bar girls are determined to fight the closure order.

Under the banner of the Bharatiya Dance Bar Girls Union (BGU) the girls are demanding a rehabilitation package, from the Maharashtra state government, comprising at least three months wages.

Said Varsha Kale, president of the BGU: ''We are demanding rehabilitation and a comprehensive compensation package for all the girls -- their survival and that of their families are at stake.''

So far, R.R. Patil, the driving force behind the ban and the state's deputy chief minister, has shown inclination to only compensate girls native to Maharashtra although the vast majority are from other Indian states such as southern Andhra Pradesh, northern Uttar Pradesh and neighbouring Nepal.

Patil sees the dance bars as ''a corrupting influence on youth'' besides being a ''security risk'', since they employ foreigners from neighbouring countries like Bangladesh. But his stance has been interpreted as an attempt to win local sympathy for a move that has divided the Congress party that is in power in Maharashtra and also leads the ruling national United Progressive Alliance. ''

This is a sensitive issue and there should have been a public debate first instead of waking up one day and imposing a ban,'' said Milind Deora, a young Congress party Member of Parliament from Mumbai.

Support for the cause of the dance bar girls has come from two other sitting Congress party parliamentarians, Sunil Dutt and Govinda, both of them well-known movie stars and in-the-know of the murky workings of Mumbai's show biz world which also boasts the world's biggest film-making industry.

Last month, BGU's Kale led a delegation of dance bar girls to the capital New Delhi to seek the intervention of Congress party president Sonia Gandhi who promised help. The Congress chief summoned Maharashtra Chief Minister Vasantrao Deshmukh for consultations, raising hopes that the axe may yet not fall on the dance bars.

Both Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Gandhi are committed to ''reforms with a human face'' and have already intervened to halt a ruthless drive ordered by Deshmukh to bulldoze Mumbai's sprawling slum clusters in December and January - but not before some 400,000 people were left without a roof over their heads.

Singh, a former economist with the World Bank credited with initiating India's economic liberalisation during a stint as India's finance minister between 1991 and 1996 urged Mumbai's citizens, during a visit in October 2004, to transform themselves over the next five years so that ''people will forget Shanghai.''

But those well-meant urgings seemed to have been the cue for the heartless slum demolitions and now the crackdown on dance bar girls - ignoring the fact that the dancers are successors to a long line of courtesans and professionals who perform traditional Indian dancing.

According to Kale, during her meetings with Gandhi, she discussed the possibility that dance bar girls would, as a result of the ban, be compelled to turn to prostitution for a living.

''Girls without hope will gravitate into the hands of pimps and brothel owners who often set up shop in residential buildings,'' warned Julio Rebeiro, Mumbai's former police commissioner known for the crusade he led against organised crime in the city.

Rebeiro, who is critical of the ban on dance bars firmly believes that the government is better off not playing nanny to its citizens and leave the job of minding public morals to religious leaders and community elders.

Dance bars and the girls who work in them are immortalised in 'Maximum City- Bombay Lost and Found', the celebrated book on Mumbai brought out last year by Suketu Mehta -- the New York-based writer who has to his credit the Whiting Writers Award and the O. Henry Prize.

''In these bars, fully clothed young girls dance on an extravagantly decorated stage to recorded Hindi film music and men come to watch, shower money over their heads and fall in love,'' wrote Mehta in his highly-rated chronicle of the Indian city. . (END/2005)