A waiter pours a mug of beer at a pub in Mumbai June 3, 2012. A 63-year-old prohibition law requiring every adult above the age of 25 to get a drinking permit exists in India's western state of Maharashtra but it's never been taken seriously. However, Mumbai city authorities are now cracking down on illegal drinking after busting a rave party in one of Mumbai's posh neighbourhoods last month.VIVEK PRAKASH/Reuters
There's an icy chill hanging over the dance floors of Mumbai these days, after a series of police raids on many of the city's hippest watering holes.
Assistant Commissioner of Police Vasant Dhoble – also known in news reports and Facebook pages as Mumbai's "Public Enemy Number One" – has launched a campaign to, he says, enforce safety and morality laws in the city's pubs and nightclubs.
His squad, which belongs to a branch of the police called the Social Services Arm, with a somewhat nebulous agenda, has taken to bursting into pubs and roughly carting off patrons. Mr. Dhoble himself carries a field hockey stick and a video camera to keep track of the law-breakers.
The laws in question? Well, first, there's the one about the drinking permit. Under the Bombay Prohibition Act of 1949, which remains in effect, a person who wishes to consume alcohol, even in his or her own home, must be 25 years of age and have obtained a permit from the government to be exempted from prohibition. (Never mind that prohibition itself was lifted in 1973). Violators face fines of up to $1,000 and five years in jail.
Is the permit law broken ten thousand times a day in India's biggest city? Of course. Your correspondent can report witnessing the cavalier violation of this law on multiple occasions. But Commissioner Dhoble's team seems keen to enforce it, at least in high-end nightclubs.
Similarly there is a 1960 law that prohibits more than a given number of couples, usually set at 10 in a permit, from being on a dance floor – even if the venue is 1,000 square feet; police have charged a few clubs with that one. And there are the dozen different permits that establishments require to play "public music."
Commissioner Dhoble says he's just enforcing the rules and if people have a problem with the laws, they can take it up with the government that writes them. "Let people enjoy – we are not curbing the nightlife," he told television reporters tailing a recent raid.
Others, however, see an agenda at work – particularly in the comments he has made to media about the "skimpy" (and Western) clothes worn by the young women picked up in these raids.
"The police live in a different world – they believe different things, they live in a different era – and they associate morality with stepping out," Ashwin Mushran, a Mumbai actor and DJ, told The Globe and Mail. "If people are out having a nice time there's nothing criminal about that. But now everyone has to be afraid. The police are a law unto themselves."
Two women, sisters whom police recently detained on prostitution charges in a raid on a restaurant, responded by slapping a lawsuit on Commissioner Dhoble and the police force for wrongful detention and defamation. The women say they were celebrating a colleague's birthday and submitted their pay stubs and tax returns to the court to make clear that while they are working women, but they're not the kind the commissioner assumed they were because he found them in a mixed-gender social gathering.
While elite Mumbai is raging at Commissioner Dhoble, it's also true that he has defenders, who see him as finally cracking down on the casual way that the city's moneyed upper crust flouts the law. Many of the venues raided have been in violation of the standard overcrowding law on the books in Mumbai, for example.
Mr. Mushran pointed out that police have issued very few new permits to venues in recent years, and so a great many of the establishments in question may have shady legal status – but they have operated just fine up until now, likely by paying large bribes to Commissioner Dhoble's police force.
The commissioner, the Mumbai media revealed this week, has a somewhat checkered past himself. In 1989, while working in Pune, not far from Mumbai, he was suspended for accepting a bribe, and in 1994 he was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in the death of a suspect in police custody. Commissioner Dhoble, who is believed to have powerful political patrons, had that decision overturned by a higher court. An inquiry into his appointment to the Mumbai police force is pending.
A review of Mumbai's liquor laws, however, is not.