Why they gang up to stifle Mumbai’s spirit

Until three months ago, Baywatch was Sarita’s employer. Unknown to the world outside Khalapur’s brick-kilns, it was this bungalow-like dance bar that made its way to a legislative note and triggered an order to end the dance-bar business.

On November 10, 2004, Baywatch and nine other bars frequented by boisterous travellers and locals on the old highway to Pune were shut by the police on getting complaints of ‘‘moral corruption’’ from Vivek Patil, a 50-year-old MLA from the Left-leaning Peasants and Workers Party (PWP), a failed ’60s alternative to the Congress.

But a party of three MLAs isn’t something Maharashtra’s tense coalition can ignore, so the little-known Patil first pressured Home Minister R R Patil to launch the crackdown in Raigad.

Then, referring to Baywatch—renamed NightQueen for luck in an ineffectual attempt to reopen this year—he got a debate going that finally ended in R R Patil pronouncing an industry supporting thousands, glamourised in films and foreign tour guides, was ‘‘corrupting our youth’’.

The son of a farmer and a man of simple tastes, Vivek Patil is one of a loosely bound coterie of self-appointed guardians policing the morals of a city—and feeding off each other’s campaigns for a variety of reasons—striving to position itself as India’s Shanghai (see box).

None of these crackdowns on television, film posters and dance bars form any part of the Congress-NCP manifesto. They use tenuous legal grounds and extreme interpretations of archaic, mostly discarded laws to disrupt business. And they certainly serve to distract attention from Mumbai’s stymied makeover—90,000 shanties were razed before Sonia Gandhi put a stop—and Maharashtra’s burgeoning problems of farmer suicides, chronic water shortages and struggling agriculture.

Moral policing, initiated in the city by the Sena and condemned by the rest, is now the unofficial common minimum programme of the purist coalition which has almost all political parties including Sonia Gandhi’s Congress and Sharad Pawar’s NCP.

Also, there’s vocal support for the moral police from a bunch of organisations increasingly uncomfortable with the push-the-boundaries images and attitudes of Mumbai’s globalising younger generations. And while there’s also an uncertain, alarmed silence from most of Bollywood and business—both ever gauging the wind direction—there are voices rising above the silence.

‘‘It’s very difficult to put sanskriti (culture) and vikruti (perversion) to test because society itself is responsible for both things,’’ actor-turned-Congress MP Govinda said, reacting to his own government’s ban on dance bars. ‘‘And when you are out to stop some business, you must first take into consideration its outcome, both social and economic.’’

But Home Minister Patil and his boss Vilasrao Deshmukh (who now insists most of Mumbai’s dance-bar girls are ‘‘Bangladeshi’’ and hence a threat to national security) proffer views that sound less from the Congress family than from the Sangh Parivar.

‘‘You have done a great service to society… I must say you behaved like an RSS worker who always gives top priority to cultural values,’’ BJP MLA Sudhir Munganttiwar told NCP leader R R Patil in the Assembly last week. The next day his party changed tack and questioned the NCP’s motives in ordering the shutdown.

Ironically, Shiv Sena leaders—presently under a gag order from Bal Thackeray—privately ridicule the dance-bar ban. And elsewhere, the argument is clear: a city cannot globalise with populist crackdowns on popular culture.

‘‘If you want to make Mumbai the showroom of the country, if you want to bring it on par with Shanghai, then you can’t have the mindset of the 18th or 19th century,’’ argued film-maker Mahesh Bhatt, whose film posters have been slapped with obscenity charges.

Back in Raigad, out-of-work bar dancer Sarita (she once earned up to Rs 20,000 a month) finds herself living on the kindness of her landlord. Going home to her family’s poverty in UP—and explaining Shahid, fathered by a brick-kiln owner—is out of the question. As she prepares to try finding a job as a maid, her once-soaring ambitions are now grounded in grimness. ‘‘All I want,’’ she said, ‘‘is for Shahid to grow up and join any profession that is free from police raids.’’

(With inputs from Vijay Singh)

PART II

PART III

PART IV

PART V