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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Moral Police | The year Mumbai came full circle
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Moral Police | The year Mumbai came full circle

After ACP Vasant Dhoble's SS run ended, the party had just about reignitedbut he is back

Imaging by: Jayachandran & Manoj Madhavan/MintPremium
Imaging by: Jayachandran & Manoj Madhavan/Mint

Shiv Sena nativism, the mercurial Sensex, film stars, the proverbial ill-managed monsoons—these headline staples don’t deter a person from other parts of Maharashtra or from another end of India’s geographical axis from migrating to Mumbai. What still attracts the industrious and the romantic to it? Why do more and more migrants inundate it every year?

It is possibly what American-Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick called “the synthetic sublime", describing her city, New York—look beyond the tarnish, and you’ll see the city’s polyglot population, a seething cultural mix, making a city with a mind and a character, as opposed to a global village. In Mumbai, less than 50% of the population speaks the native tongue Marathi. Parents in small towns still worry the city will corrupt their gifted child because they imagine absolutely nothing can thwart a young man’s or woman’s desires in “Bombay".

We Bambaiyyas wish that paranoia was still justified. The city’s reputation has been in peril for many years now. Ugly mutants of the parents hijacked Mumbai’s law and order establishment virulently and with sadistic force in 2012. The Nationalist Congress Party’s R.R. Patil, the current state home minister, Arup Patnaik, police commissioner from 2010-12, and his then subordinate, assistant commissioner of police (ACP), social services (SS) branch, Vasant Dhoble, formed a Malvolian triumvirate determined to implement archaic laws formulated in colonial times for the native mass. Dhoble used a hockey stick and a video camera to threaten, arrest and bully people because they did not have permits that no court or police establishment had asked for till then. If Shakespeare’s Malvolio from Twelfth Night was intolerant of “cakes and ales", Dhoble deemed women drinking at a restaurant worthy of being sent to a remand home for sex workers. He picked on German women tourists and filmed them because they were at Voodoo, ironically a gay nightclub that shut last year. He wielded the hockey stick at Café Zoe, a hip central Mumbai restaurant, and at Trilogy, a suburban nightclub, which shut down by July 2012. In 2012, Dhoble and his men arrested more than 100 people in a span of around seven months.

In early 2013, after a hawker died during a drive against vendors and an inquiry was initiated against him, Dhoble was shifted to an insignificant post. There were rumours he had retired.

By August 2013, the parties returned. Deejays who had stopped working because Dhoble and his men threatened to lock them up for not possessing a PPL (public performance licence) got their gigs back. The Supreme Court lifted the ban on dance bars that the Maharashtra government had forced with an amendment in the Bombay Police Act, 1951. The state chief secretary, Jayant Banthia, announced that the government was considering whittling down the number of licences required to open a restaurant. By October, even the Shiv Sena’s Aditya Thackeray, who was instrumental in having a novel by Rohinton Mistry withdrawn from the syllabus of the University of Mumbai in 2010 because of its “anti-Shiv Sena" content, made a joint public appearance with mayor Sunil Prabhu to say they were pushing the state government for round-the-clock “chilling time" in Mumbai. Trilogy opened at the same venue.

But Dhoble is back. Last week he was transferred back to the Mumbai Police’s crime branch. Himanshu Roy, joint commissioner of police, crime branch, confirmed this news. He may go back to his crucible: the Hitlerian SS branch.

The SS branch has three cells: the anti-trafficking cell that initiates action under the Prevention of Immoral Trafficking Act (PITA); the social counselling cell which deals mainly with matters of domestic violence; and the copyright violation and anti-gambling cell, again under PITA. Under this regime, it became an umbrella Act. Everything related to a night out in town, or a night of drinking at home, became illegal. You required a permit to purchase or drink alcohol although no excise official or police officer ever asked us for proof of age. The drinking permit itself is a farce. It is issued after a person of or above the age of 21 presents a certificate from a doctor saying he or she needs to consume alcohol for medical reasons.

In that dystopian June, the excise department was inspirited too. One evening, officials raided the home of Worli resident Priti Chandriani, a documentary film-maker who, after folding up a chocolaterie her family had founded, was running it as a hobby on a much smaller scale from home. They seized all her alcohol and booked her under the Bombay Prohibition Act, 1949. This Act made her ownership of 20 units of alcohol at home, and the making and selling of chocolates that contained alcohol, a crime. At that time a person could buy and store only 12 units of alcohol at a time. So even a cavernous cellar stocking several hundred bottles in a wine manufacturing state was illegal, and buying imported liquor chocolates at a supermarket was illegal.

Since then, Chandriani has been appearing for hearings at the Bombay high court. Her hearings often get deferred because judges dimiss it as “the chocolate case". She has stopped making chocolates and is making films largely in India because impending hearings do not allow her to travel out of India.

Dhoble thrived and ruled the SS branch with so much impunity because our primitive laws are unchanged, and also because the city’s citizens helped. Dhoble has rarely spoken to the media. When he has, he has said emphatically that he is working on behalf of the law and that Mumbai’s people who were fed up of late nights and loud music asked for his help. With deadpan seriousness, he said in an interview to Rolling Stone India that overcrowded nightclubs can kill people and make sex workers out of young women.

Those Dhoble harms the most help him too. Most restaurateurs, DJs, nightclub owners and socialites don’t openly speak about the irrelevance of the laws that empower him, and the need to amend and nullify them. Tehseen Poonawalla, a Pune resident who filed a petition with the National Human Rights Commission against Dhoble because of the “Talibanization of Mumbai", asking for an inquiry against his violent tactics, says: “Bombay never speaks out. The most disappointing thing about this moral police saga is that."

Two sisters had spoken. They were at a party at the Masala Curry restaurant in a western suburb when Dhoble and his men swooped. Both were arrested under PITA and then sent to a reform centre for sex workers for 21 days. After showing a large number of documents proving they were legitimate, tax-paying citizens, mothers and wives, they were released. They filed a 2 crore defamation suit against Dhoble, which the Bombay high court dismissed with a warning to them, on the ground that Dhoble had acted on behalf of the law. The sisters received no support from the city although their court appearances were reported widely by local papers. After the court verdict, they stopped talking to the media.

So the only lesson Dhoble taught them—and all those he arrested or warned—is about ourselves. In the new year, don’t expect us to do more than just ask: What is Dhoble going to do now?

Sanjukta Sharma developed a taste for brandy at her neighbourhood bar WTF.

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Published: 28 Dec 2013, 01:44 AM IST
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