MUMBAI: Fifteen girls in glittering dresses dancing to rollicking Bollywood numbers under flickering disco lights, watched by 50-100 men was a typical Mumbai dance bar before they were banned in 2005. In the often dark, seedy air-conditioned dance bars, the pungent smell of liquor and cigarette smoke lingered. However, when the bars will reopen in mid-February, they will be changed. Completely.
“We have been fighting the battle for over a decade now. Dance bars will now be brightly lit and painted with positive colours,” said Adarsh Shetty, president of Association of Hotels and Restaurents (AHAR). “We’ll stand by our members we’ll stand by them in legal battles. The government’s attempts to fit its ideas of morality in legal parlance has failed. The Supreme Court has asked the government to give licenses to dance bars on the old conditions within four weeks. The court will decide on the new legislation that has been brought in by the government.”
Bar dancers are a party in the petition before the Supreme Court. In the new legislation, the government has made a provision of salary for bar dancers instead of tips. “But bar owners don’t want to talk about it right now, ” says Advocate Varsha Kale, who represents the union of bar dancers.
Shabnam, a former bar dancer who is now in her 40s, says bar owners used to cheat the dancers. “Every girl had her own drawer where they kept the money the customers splurged on them or they received in tips. Bar owners had a share in the money. The girls suspected money was stolen from the drawers as one key was with the owners,” she says.