Letter from India: Tens of thousands of dancing bar girls have launched a vociferous campaign in India's entertainment and financial capital Bombay (Mumbai) against the government's recent ban on their activities, writes Rahul Bedi.
As part of a "moral re-armament" campaign to clean up the swinging port city, the Congress Party-led administration has ordered the closure of all dance bars. It claims the dancing girls have turned hundreds of the city's bars into crime "dens", awash with prostitution and drug-peddling.
"They [ dance bars] are corrupting the moral fibre of our youth," state deputy chief minister RR Patil says. The bars where these girls dance are only licensed to operate as eating- houses and restaurants with a liquor permit, but, Patil claims, they are being misused for illegal activities like dancing girls.
Bombay's 750-plus dance bars are the most prominent part of its nightlife visited by thousands of men raucously throwing money at about 75,000 young girls in skimpy clothes as they raunchily gyrate to songs popularised by Bollywood, the city's prolific film industry.
"Thousands of dancers will be reduced to poverty," says Varsha Kale, head of the Dance Bar-Girls Union. "They have not found jobs elsewhere and that's why they are forced to dance here." What kind of jobs will they get now, she adds, hinting that they would now be forced into prostitution in order to live.
Kale has asked the National Human Right Commission and the National Commission for Women to assure the dancers' employment. If not, she wants the state to take responsibility for their welfare.
The dancers earn an average of 1,000 rupees (€18.86) a night on tips, several times the wage they could otherwise hope to get in the teeming city's entertainment and hospitality industry.
"The government should know that they cannot crush an industry like this," says an incensed Manjit Singh, head of the Bar Owners Association. "This battle will be taken to the courts and the streets. The government is playing with people's lives."
Many Bombay residents, however, say the ban would drive their activity underground, making it more expensive for its patrons besides enhancing police corruption and encouraging powerful crime syndicates which control the city to take over its operation entirely.
At the moment the syndicates only "supervise" their operations as part of the many lucrative rackets they operate.
The National Human Rights Commission estimates that Bombay's underworld annually collects about Rs1.82 billion (€343 million) as protection money, or a daily "take" of about €939, 726, mostly from businessmen and those connected with Bollywood and the city's entertainment industry.
Senior police officials estimate that Bombay's four major gangs have an annual turnover of more than Rs200 billion (€3.77 billion).
The largest gang is run by Dawood Ibrahim from Dubai and the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi, rivalled closely by Arun Gawli, who for years controlled his outfit from jail.
The smaller gangs are headed by Chotta Rajan, who broke away from one of the bigger gangs to carve out his "territory" in northeast Bombay and operates out of several southeast Asian countries. The Naik brothers "run" parts of central Bombay.
Succeeding Indian governments have claimed that Dawood was responsible for Bombay's serial bombings in the mid-1990s in which more than 300 people died and several buildings, including the stock exchange, were blown up.
They have repeatedly asked the Pakistani authorities to hand Dawood over, but Islamabad denies his presence in the country despite a rash of media reports detailing the gang lords' activities in Karachi.
Federal Intelligence Bureau officials say each Bombay gang is operated like a corporation with legal advisers, bankers, musclemen and highly trained mercenaries or "hit men".
They say some larger gangs have hired mercenaries in the past from Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebel group for about Rs300,000-Rs500,000 rupees (€5,660-€9433) a "hit" - known locally as a supari. Assassins were provided with a variety of arms, including assault rifles and machine guns and even explosives.
Over the past five years, however, extortion under the guise of extending protection has become a major money-spinner for Bombay's gangs, often working in tandem with the police. So discredited and tainted has the city's once efficient and relatively honest police force become, that a former chief appealed to Bollywood not to portray his force negatively as it diluted its authority.