Raising the ‘Bar’: Apex court issue notice to Maharashtra Government for new law

New Delhi, Aug 30: Live Orchestra, says the signboard outside a nondescript building. That’s the signal for those looking for a dance bar in Mumbai. A live orchestra, in most restaurants, translates into a band with perhaps a female crooner. Here, it means gyrating women – or bar girls, as the dancers are known.

The signboards can be seen on Palaspe Road in Panvel, Navi Mumbai, an hour’s drive from Mumbai. The area doesn’t fall in the city municipal zone, which explains why there are many more beer bars than in the city.

One such bar – run by a Shetty (the community that owns most such bars in Mumbai and its suburbs) – is spilling over with people. Hefty bouncers outside know whom to keep out, and whom to allow in. Patrons are asked to switch off their phones and eagle eyes watch out for the slightest of deviations. The men hold their drinks and watch the women dance.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notice to Maharashtra Government over new law for dance bar licenses.

The BJP-led state government has been asked to reply within six months.

The apex court had in May directed the Maharashtra Government to grant licenses to eight dance bars within two days and asked them to give an undertaking that they would not engage employees with criminal antecedents near the dance area.

The Dance Bar Regulation Bill, that was unanimously passed by the Assembly on April 13, among other things, prohibits serving liquor in performance areas and mandates that the premises must shut by 11:30 pm. It also imposes heavy penalties on dance bar owners and customers for not following these rules.

The apex court, on March 2, had rejected certain suggestions like providing live CCTV footage to police of performances in the dance bars and asked the state government to grant licences to owners within 10 daysafter they comply with the modified guidelines.

The men shower the women with money dimly lit halls. Waiters in waistcoats discreetly collect the notes and move away. Sixty per cent of the showered money goes to the bar owner, the rest to the girls. The night is long in beer bars and often the lights are put out and the girls hustled into some deep cavity in a wall when the police raid a bar.

Despite bans and rules, beer bars are functioning in Maharashtra, though mostly illegally. Bribes are paid to the police to keep the bars going. Some bars in the city have gone underground. Outside the city limits, many function as usual.

“Rules are just an excuse to extort money,” says a beer bar owner who does not want to be named.

Mumbai’s beer bars are seldom out of the news. Once called the Las Vegas of the East, the bars did roaring business in the 90s and the first half of the next decade. Then, in 2005, a short-statured politician who was the home minister of Maharashtra, decided that it was a monster’s head that needed to be sliced off.

R.R. Patil died in 2015, but not before dismantling beer bars and their contingent of 75,000 dancers. Many of the women went into mujra dancing – doing special shows for the rich, some went away to Dubai, or to other cities. And a few took to prostitution.

For the girls who lost their livelihood, life has not been the same again. A former beer bar dancer says that she has to look after her two young daughters. To educate one daughter, she has asked the other to work as a compounder with a local physician. The mother scours for work at night. She is older now, so it’s not easy to find a spot in a bar anymore.

The background of the ban

On August 15, 2005, the Maharashtra government banned all dance bars in Mumbai to “prevent immoral activities, trafficking of women and to ensure the safety of women in general”.

The ban was challenged in the Bombay high court on the grounds that it was an infringement of Articles 14 and 19(1)(g) of the Constitution, which guarantee, respectively, the right to equality and the right to practise any profession. The court ruled that the ban infringed both of these rights and overturned it.

The matter was then heard by the Supreme Court, which upheld the high court’s decision and ruled that the ban was unconstitutional. The case was decided on July 16, 2013.

Yet, for two-and-a-half years after the Supreme Court’s verdict, the Maharashtra government did not overturn the ban. This forced the court to step in again and give directions to the government to issue  licences to dance bars by early March of this year. Four licenses were issued, which were then revoked. For now, the number of licensed dance bars in Mumbai stands at zero.

Against this backdrop, the Maharashtra government is working hard at drafting legislation to ban dance bars, only this time in a way that would prevent it from being struck down as unconstitutional.

For the Maharashtra government, clearly, the bars are a bugbear. They ordered that beer bars should have CCTVs, which should be connected to the local police station. The dance bar owners went to court on this, and it was decided that CCTVs would be posted at the entrance and exit points, but not inside the bar.

The state government has put in other riders: No dance beer bars can function near religious places. Also, it was decreed that dancing couldn’t happen in the permit room, where alcohol is served – but only in the dining area.

The government’s decision to have a five-foot gap between patrons and the dancers (a violation could lead to six months in jail or Rs 50,000 as fine) has not gone down well with either patrons or dancers. “Who is to decide whether somebody accidentally brushed against a girl or did so deliberately,” asks Varsha Kale, president of the Indian Bar Girls’ Association.

Despite the plethora of rules, nothing much is going to change, predicts Shailesh Tawte, a television journalist who has been researching dance beer bars for 10 years. “The show will go on,” he says.