Maharashtra: Congress Dancing to Shiv Sena's tune

(Mid Day - May 8, 2005

  Dancing to Shiv Sena's tune
   By: Vir Sanghvi
   
Have you ever been to a dance bar? It’s okay, you don’t have to answer the question if you are reading this at home. But speaking for myself, I have to say, hand placed firmly on heart, that not only have I never been to a dance bar, I’d never even heard of the bloody things till two years ago.
 That was when I was on a flight from Delhi to Bombay and one of the other passengers, a young woman in her 20s, struck up a conversation.
She seemed nice enough, dressed in a style that could be described as Bollywood baroque but spoke no English.

It’s ironic that there is a crack down on a legitimate establishment, while pimps and the organised underworld that run brothels are allowed to go freeMy curiosity eventually got the better of me. It was clear that she had money — she said she had flown to Delhi for the weekend to see her parents who lived in South Extension — but it was unclear how this wealth had been generated.
She worked in a beer bar, she told me. Sensing my befuddlement — was she a particularly well-paid waitress, I wondered — she explained patiently that all over North Bombay, many ‘beer bars’ also had little stages on which girls like her danced to Hindi film songs.
She was paid virtually nothing by the bar, she said, but because of her great beauty and bewitching dance style ( I think it is fair to say that she was not a very modest person) customers rushed to the stage and showered her with currency notes.
Obviously, my body language betrayed me — by this stage, I was edging away from her and wondering if all she did was dance — because she rushed to assure me that she was a good girl, that she went home alone at nights and that she had a boyfriend (“but my parents don’t know.”)
I put the encounter down to experience. I knew I’d never run into her again and as for the Arabian Nights world of beer bars, I was startled to find that there existed places where customers threw money at dancers. Obviously Bombay, the city I grew up in, had changed a lot in the decade-and-a-half that I had been away.
Imagine my surprise then to find ‘beer bar’ cropping up in the conversation everywhere I went. You know how it is. You learn a new word or come across a new phenomenon and then suddenly, you run into it again and again over the next few months.
So it was with beer bars. I learnt, from my Bombay friends, that the term ‘dance bars’ was more commonly used; perhaps my co-passenger had thought that beer bars sounded more up-market. I interviewed the actress Tabu who had starred in a film about dance bars called Chandni Bar (though Tabu claimed she hadn’t done much research for the role). And there were dance bar sequences in every Satya-type film set in Bombay.
Even so I had no idea that these dance bars would, one day, become the focus of a major controversy in India’s most cosmopolitan city.
In fact, when I first read about the Bombay police’s ‘crackdown’ on dance bars, my first thought was “way to go, boys! Just what we’ve come to expect of the Bombay police. Let the gangsters go free, and crack down on the dancing girls”.
But only in recent weeks have I realized that it isn’t just the police who object to dance bars. Apparently, the state government — and the Home Minister in particular — has turned the closing down of these bars into a hot political issue.
Despite widespread opposition — from nearly every sensible columnist I have read and one little sardarji who turns up on every TV channel to allege that the police are on the take (wow! No kidding, Sherlock?) — the state government is determined to press ahead with its crusade to close down every dance bar and drive the girls on the streets.
As far as I can tell, the state government’s objections follow predictable lines: alcohol is served at these bars; bad people frequent them; the girls lead men to temptation by causing them to have dirty thoughts; our moral fibre is under attack from swaying hips etc etc.
None of this is very profound or worth arguing about. There was a time in the last decade when my old friend Pramod Navalkar was Puritan-in-Chief for the Shiv Sena government and ran similar campaigns: close bars early, remove offensive posters, ban anything with XXX in its name because this is a reference to hardcore porn ( I kid you not) and lock up your daughters.
There are perfectly good liberal arguments against the Navalkaresque position but I’m not going to insult your intelligence by recycling them yet again.
All I will say is this: isn’t it curious that in a city with what could well be Asia’s largest population of prostitutes (Navalkar’s own estimate) the government is not targeting the pimps or the organized underworld that runs the brothels? Instead, it is out to ban the one activity that is open, legitimate and licensed.
All of this intolerance would be quite understandable if the Shiv Sena–BJP government was still in power. After all, the Sena’s single greatest achievement, while in office, was to destroy the free soul of one of the world’s great cities and to turn Bombay into a puritanical backwater.
But here’s the thing: the Shiv-Sena-BJP lost the election. (Actually, they lost two elections). Poor old Pramod Navalkar is no longer a minister.
Bal Thackeray sits and broods at home. Even Sanjay Nirupam has suddenly discovered secularism, presented a chadar at the Ajmer dargah and become a Congressman. The Shiv Sena is in disarray. The BJP is in disgrace. (I’m not going to explain why, but two words should do it: Pramod Mahajan).
All this absurd intolerance is actually the handiwork of a Congress government.
The party that says it wants to lead young India into the 21st Century is behaving a blurred carbon copy of the discredited Shiv Sena.
How can my Congress government be so foolish? I’ve read one of the explanations offered by the media and it makes some sense.
It is Bombay’s continual misfortune that despite contributing so much of India’s Gross National Product, it counts for nothing politically.
Maharashtra will always be run by some guys from the hinterland, who do not understand Bombay and loathe the modernity it represents.
They don’t have to fight elections in Bombay, so they follow the sort of regressive policies that please the voters of the villages and small towns they win their elections from.
This probably explains why the anti-dance Home Minister is trying to drag Bombay back by a century or two. Where he comes from, women don’t dance. And as far as he’s concerned, that’s how it should be all over the world.
But what of Vilasrao Deshmukh, a wise, otherwise modern, man of sophistication and intellect? Why does he go along with this nonsense?
Why is he letting his government — one that has so many genuine problems, including the pathetic electricity supply — be hijacked by a Shiv Sena agenda? What of the central leadership? Is there nobody in Delhi who can stop this foolishness?
I have a theory. I first developed it when the Maharashtra Congress was declaring that Veer Savarkar — the antithesis of a Congress icon — was a great guy and Congressmen were loudly abusing Mani Shankar Aiyar. (In the event, Mani was right to the extent that Savarkar never took off as an election issue.)
And then, as Navalkarism became the party’s credo and its leaders fought Sunil Dutt in their zeal to admit Sanjay Nirupam into the state Congress, I became convinced that my theory was correct.
The Congress in Maharashtra exists in its own universe. It no longer stands for the things that the Congress, at a national level, says it believes in. Instead, it stands for all the things that the Shiv Sena once stood for. (There’s even been a retread of the Sena’s anti-Bangladeshi rhetoric in defence of the dance bar crackdown.)
I don’t know why Maharashtra’s Congress leaders have allowed this to happen. Perhaps they are so much in the shadow of Sharad Pawar that they think that the only way to distinguish themselves from him is to turn into the spiritual heirs of Bal Thackeray.
Whatever the reason, what is happening is crazy. And it if continues, the Congress may retain Maharashtra, but it will lose the heart and mind of India’s greatest city.

By arrangement with The Hindustan Times