The police raid on Malad lounge Oro, supposedly for playing music illegally, but instead penalising people for dancing obscenely, was like something out of a soap opera. Who tipped them off? Some purani dushmani of the owner? An old lover settling scores with an ex? Inside these questions the basic question -- why, why?


Illustration/ Jishu Dev Malakar

In December 2006, a similar incident, Operation Majnu took place in Meerut, where cops stormed Gandhi Bagh/Company Gardens and started to beat up young couples canoodling in the park, or girls soaking in some winter sun, because aimless pleasure by girls is obviously dangerous and necessitates a public beating. Of course, that incident had the added violence of the police taking along news cameras in order to "expose" the immoralists.

Incidents like this were the staple of TV news for a couple years after. We don't need that stuff on TV anymore because now we have Emotional Atyachar and other moral programs, wreaking similar vigilante justice on TV.

There's a tendency to dismiss such incidents as upheavals in small towns, and their panic in the face of "modernity", whatever that means. But if the Malad incident reveals something, it is that these divisions of the small town and the big city can be facile. The city, the town and the village exist along a continuum with both, physical and notional journeys back and forth.

Like responses in Meerut, here we have Akshay Kumar, star of films featuring socially-conscious item numbers and the occasional slapping of white female chorus dancers, saying that the method might have been wrong, but what the police did, was in essence, right. In Meerut, people said -- "the youth were discussing studies" and here they say -- "some girls were in salwar kameez", thus playing into the prejudice that kissing, dancing or wearing skirts is bad (hence deserves punishment).

The first reaction some of us feel to such ocurrences is a rush of anger, swiftly followed by contempt expressed for the moral police. But in Meerut, a year after Operation Majnu, to make a film about it, I found a complex weave of feelings and impulses that surrounded the incident. Hindu-Muslim prejudice and suspicion, the panting pressure of TV channels looking for tabloid-style stories, high-speed economic changes -- all these radiated out from the incident, revealing a need to think about it quite differently than with the fruitless dichotomy of backwardness vs. modernity.

That's why the responses of those in the club who bore the brunt of the action made me smile. They have started a forum called Victims of Moral Police, and are going to hold seminars and meetings where they will invite other couple-victims (hopefully same-sex and heterosexual couples) and the police to engage with each other. These conversations about what is indecent and what's the decent response to it, have to start to ease out mixed resentments of class, gender and morality at the heart of such incidents.

Like many middle-class acitivities nowadays, apparently this has the blessings of Anna Hazare. I'm still hopeful it won't fizzle out into goody-goody pontification, but could bring some shifts as it's an issue that genuinely concerns young people. At the same time it's good to hold on to some righteous anger. For that we have DJ Jenny D's response. She's the rather glamorous DJ who plays at Oro's hip-hop Bollywood nights. She will be releasing a new track called "The Mumbai police don't dance s***", a nice creative way to shout back instead of shutting the other guy up. You be sure to dance to that too.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevi.com.