New Delhi : The Supreme Court on Thursday pulled up the Maharashtra government for not complying with its earlier order asking it to consider granting dance bars licenses to hoteliers and ordered it to now process such pleas within two weeks. A bench of justices Dipak Misra and P C Pant, while expressing unhappiness on non-implementation of its October 15 interim order, said the hoteliers will also have to comply with the rules. “We remind that the state is obliged by law to enforce the order without any deviation. The order passed by the court has to be respected… Issue licenses to bars in two weeks,” the bench said.
The court also raised questions over the state government laws banning dance bars and said as to “how individual morality, perceptive morality and selective morality can merge into collective and legal morality.” It, meanwhile, allowed Vinod Patil, President of R R Patil Foundation, to intervene in the matter. Patil had in his plea claimed that re-opening of dance bars would increase crime. Senior advocate Harish Salve, appearing for Maharashtra, however, said that any direction of the court will be respected and adhered to. “The bars were a great draw among the youth and heavy drinking and watching dance was completely unacceptable to the state,” he contended.
Besides the reopening of dance bars could lead to rise in prostitution across the state. But the bench, asking the government to issue licenses to bars to host dance performances within two weeks, maintained that people have a right to carry out a profession so long as they perform it within acceptable parameters. “There cannot be any prohibition… women who have got distinction in a particular type of dance cannot be deprived of adopting it as their profession,” the judge said.
