Dance Bars: humane side of the story..

Two days a friend from a local mira road paper called me,”did you hear about the SC decision on dance bars,tell me your party’s stance I am doing a piece on that”,I honestly hadn’t put any thought on that.I told him that I will check with the senior party member and tell him.I felt a bit embarrassed actually, that  I had actually not put any thought on that, It’s a big burning issue of the area where we work “Mira Road’ as we have a lot of “Live Orchestras “ there inspite of a ban.

I knew that a lot of illegal activities including human traffic goes on under the name of dance bars,we ourselves have on a few occasions rescued minor girls who were being sold off  in the area.But suddenly I remember a girl,a 25 year old ,former bar dancer.This girl used to come to support us during the Anna Andolan,we always saw her in the crowd. One of  our members ,Amishaji used to have conversation with her on a lot of occasions. Later I saw Amishji giving her children’s books and clothes.One day when I was coming back with her from a protest she told me  that she was a former bar dancer with 3 kids,her husband had deserted her, she was originally from Bhagalpur(Bihar). She was supporting her parents, children as well as a younger siste ,also she was a cancer patient herself. She was now singing at one of the “live Orchastras”, and can hardly make the ends meet. I knew this girl had kids, but never knew so much, we all respected her for coming in andolans, leaving behind her kids, but now we were completely shocked with her bravery.

We tried to help her as much as we could, she sang well so we asked our members who were in the industry to get her some job.We did manage to get some assignments for her,one of our more benevolent and financially well off members took the responsibility of paying for her treatment. This was the first time I saw these bar dancer on a more humane level. Till now I had just heard about how these Dance Bars were unethical and immoral. I too feel these men do not go to dance bars to watch the skills of these ladies dancing there.I had also heard how thousands of families were destroyed because of this addiction.I also know how these drunk people ,leaving the dance bar create a nuisance for the residents, eve teasing and drunken brawls are a common feature of the neighborhoods where these bars are present. But now for me there was one more side to dance bars.

Recent order by supreme court takes into account the right to earn livelihood of these seventy thousand ladies who were dancing in these bars and has decided to reopen these bars. It must have been a good news to the thousands who were fighting this care in the supreme court, but at the same time the normal residents are scared. They don’t want these bars to restart, and they have a valid reason, it proved to be a nuisance so was shut down seven years ago.

This whole thing is very tricky, on one hand there are the rights of these bar dancers and on the other the fear of human trafficking and other such activities. On the other hand these bar dancers will get some safely now since it is legal, earlier they were operating by giving haftas but were not able to report things that were happening to them.

 I think in such a case the permission of the local people should be taken before starting the dance bars again. If we residents of an area feel that there should be no dance bars in our area, our wish should be respected. In this particular case I suppose the local governance model of Arvind kejriwal’s book “swaraj” is apt. There is no better solution in this case, Will of local people should be respected and taken into account for this particular decision.