Issue licences to dance bars in 2 weeks: SC to Maha
PTI
New Delhi
The Supreme Court on Thursday pulled up Maharashtra government for not complying with its earlier order asking it to consider granting licenses of dance bars 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 drinking heavily and watching dance was completely unacceptable to the state,” he contended.
Besides the youth going astray, Salve further said that the reopening of dance bars could also result in increase of crime and prostitution across the state.
He said that the state government banned dance bars after noticing the negative impact on youngsters who indulged in selling their ancestral properties, getting astounding prices and showering money in dance bars.
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.
