Kavitha Iyer

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 One would think that for a state government professing to offer Mumbai to the global community as an international hub for commerce and entertainment, the whining of a handful of legislators against the cheerleaders would have been an embarrassment. The cricket-watching world would have been amused. BCCI boss Sharad Pawar would have been considerably less amused.

The government made light of the situation, with Home Minister R.R. Patil quickly clarifying that dance bars have been banned in the state, not dancing. But coming exactly a day after the same legislators shouted down all reasonable debate on sex education for Maharashtra’s pre-teens, the damage was done—at least some of Mumbai’s modish ways appear to be pure make-believe.

Deciding what is fit for consumption by Mumbaiites is an onerous task the Congress-NCP government and the city’s police force have undertaken with much gusto. For several years, couples cosying up along the city’s seafronts have been periodically rounded up, fined and booked for obscene behaviour in a public place. But with space—and privacy—at such a premium, the repeated “anti-obscenity” drives haven’t left the slightest dent along Bandra Bandstand and Carter Road promenades’ row of couples each evening.

An elected corporator got every single bench in a public park in central Mumbai replaced with stone single-seaters. His corporator’s fund—public money—paid for the replacements. In 2004, a giant hoarding for a brand of male briefs was stripped after some found it too graphic. The complainant in the case was a police inspector. Then came action against adult content on television, followed by a ban on Mumbai’s iconic dance-bars.

The shrinking space for the counter viewpoint in Mumbai has also meant that a series of art exhibitions have received special attention. A woman visitor offended by the explicit nature of an artist’s works at a South Mumbai art gallery lodged a complaint at the local police station. The nude displays were then covered in reams of black cloth, as a protest, uncovered only by the police to record them as evidence.

When, in December last year, a prominent artist was offered a “suggestion” by police officials, who visited his exhibition at the same gallery, to permit entry only for adults, he complied. And later said: “When I lived in Bombay, it used to be a cosmopolitan city. I don’t know how and when it transformed into a parochial village.”

When this year began miserably with two young women molested by a crowd of drunken men at Juhu, politicians across party lines went into overdrive on talk shows: suddenly, every deprave was a product of sex on television; women who consume alcohol are inviting trouble and every couple holding hands in public was a threat to “our culture”.

What rancorous turns this holier-than-thou attitude can take became obvious when, following the arrest of a group of mostly Maharashtrian boys after the January 1 molestation incident, Raj Thackeray met Home Minister R.R. Patil to plead their case. Shiv Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray couldn’t be left behind and said: It must have been the “outsiders”.

That’s where the noise over the cheerleaders comes from too—a belief that Mumbai’s culture is defined by a handful of its politicians.

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