India: Perverted eagerness to criminalise normality -- mannequins, couples holding hands, dance bars (Palash Krishna Mehrotra)

From: India Today / COLUMNS /
Palash Krishna Mehrotra /

Dancing in the dark

Mail Today | New Delhi, July 28, 2013

In 2005, the Maharashta government banned dance bars citing as a reason their 'corrupting influence on society'. The government insisted that these bars had become 'dens of vice' where illegal activities like gambling and prostitution flourished. There was a paternalistic undertone to the ban: bar girls are often forced into prostitution; we need to protect our vulnerable women.

Hypocrisy

The government promised to rehabilitate these dancers (numbering 75,000); there was talk of training them in NGO vocations. One more handicrafts centre for Mrs Biden to visit. Even this didn't happen. Instead, most of these women were rendered jobless. Many returned to their hometowns, while others, ironically, took to prostitution.The government bolstered its argument with the usual mix of hypocrisy and lies. It's common knowledge that politicians own many of these bars. Policemen would extract bribes from the dancers, providing them with a side income that was often more than their monthly salary. At a rally held in 2005 to protest the ban, a dancer said: "They say we are immoral. But they have no shame coming and raiding the bars in order to extort money from us. What does that make them? Bhadwas?" The state government claimed that these bars attracted "foreign girls who spoilt the city's moral fibre." The truth is that most of these 'foreigners' hailed from the small towns and villages of UP, West Bengal and Maharashtra. Also, high-end establishments were exempted from the ban. No similar initiatives were launched to curb actual streetwalking or massage parlours.

The Indian Hotel and Restaurants Association, the Association of Dance Bar Owners and the Bharatiya Bargirls Union were among the petitioners who challenged the state government's ban. In a recent ruling, an SC bench lifted the ban, thus upholding a 2006 judgement of the Bombay High Court that called the ban discriminatory. Justice Nijjar wrote: "We are unable to accept the presumption that the enjoyment of [the] same kind of entertainment by the upper classes leads only to mere enjoyment and in the case of poor classes, it would lead to immorality, decadence and depravity. Morality and depravity cannot be pigeon-holed by degrees depending upon the classes of the audience."

It's a reasonable argument. Something like this was also taking place in 1960s New York where anti-smut campaigns sought to remove coin-operated peep shows in Times Square patronised by the 'hoi polloi', while allowing high-end sex spectacles like Oh! Calcutta!, which featured full frontal nudity, on the Broadway stage. This is the point where the SC judgement shows its limitation. It reduces the terms of argument to class, while avoiding what the issue is really about: gender rights, specifically the rights of women over their bodies, their right to practice a profession, and to indulge in a lifestyle of their choice. Remember, Article 19(1)(g) of our Constitution guarantees to every citizen the fundamental right to practice any profession
and to carry on any occupation.

The Maharashtra home minister RR Patil has been quick to exploit the aforementioned dichotomy. OK, he's said, if our policy is class discriminatory, then let us fix it. His solution is to have a blanket ban for all establishments. For the bar girls, it's back to square one.

Rights

The SC judgment might have achieved more if it had evaluated the ban in the light of women's rights. It does nothing to resolve the question of morality that led to the ban. No measures are suggested to improve the work conditions of the dancers. It is silent on the issue of fixing a minimum wage for them. Most bar owners don't pay a salary, taking instead a 40 to 50 per cent cut from the tips the dancers earn. Many have been jobless for 8 long years. Who will pay them compensation for the loss of legitimate income, something for which the state is solely responsible?

Conservative moralities advocated by governments seek to control women's sexuality while allowing men the right to satisfy their lust. Men can have mercenary sex with women whom respectable society holds in low esteem. As Gay Talese has said, these women, largely from the lower classes, become sexual servants in a system that punishes them.

Morals

In the words of Austrian psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich: "Adultery and prostitution are part... of the double sexual morality which allow the man, in marriage as well as before, what the woman, for economic reasons, must be denied."

One also wonders about the "sphincter morality" (Freudian radical Geza Roheim's term) of the politicians and policemen who enact and enforce these laws. Reich for one believed that people who tend to regard expressions of sexuality in society as vile were often those who have failed to achieve sexual gratification in their own lives. For years, the Congress-NCP and the BJP-Shiv Sena alliances have been trying to outdo each other in moral conservatism. At the centre of their eagerness to criminalise normality (mannequins, couples holding hands, dance bars) there seems to exist a perverse motive. It's almost as if the government wants the people to break the law so that it can then exercise its prerogative to punish.

As the government official in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged says: "Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's in it for anyone?... Just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed and enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of lawbreakers and then you cash in on the guilt."

The writer is the author of The Butterfly Generation


Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/maharashta-government-dance-bars-bribes-bombay-high-court-morality/1/296698.html