Bengaluru Bar Raids: Do Crackdowns on ‘Inappropriately Dressed’ Women Violate Article 19(1)(g) Freedom of Profession?

Tactics like these create a climate of fear and intimidation among employers, which unacceptably deters them from hiring women or forces them to adopt rigid, discriminatory dress codes in practice.

Lively nightlife Bengaluru is known as an exceptional city for its lively nightlife. This corner of the country has weathered much of the backlash over a sudden and sharp escalation in police raids on Nigerian bars, pubs, and other outlets of enjoyment—even on compounds where women are claimed to be “appropriately garbed” or committing “acts of immorality.” 

Frequently conducted under the pretense of upholding public decency and morality, these raids have sparked a contentious debate regarding their legality, necessity, and potential violations of fundamental civil rights, such as the right to freedom of profession as guaranteed by Article 19(1)(g) of the Indian Constitution.

Ranu Ghosh, Moral Policing Disguised as Maintaining Public Order

These actions often include police raids on such venues, sometimes at the break of day, resulting in citations for the absence of the proper license, disturbing the peace, and indecency/obscenity. This brings us to another recurring theme in all these operations: the violent objectification of women, especially those employed as dancers, waitstaff, and other entertainers. 

Law enforcement, then and unfortunately now, uses ambiguous terms such as “dress code” or “behavior necessitating a ‘cooling’ environment” or “considered a threat to the thin blue line” to illustrate the many threads of excessive force employed to protect the community and the thin blue line. 

We know our opponents will argue that these regulations are simply a cynical disguise for moralistic policing, requiring exotic dancers to follow arbitrary and capriciously created dress code guidelines, with a disparate impact on women and the businesses that employ them.

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Article 19(1)(g): Freedom to Practice Profession, Trade, or Business

These kinds of protections are not just beneficial policy. They’re explicitly protected under Article 19(1)(g) of India’s Constitution, which guarantees every citizen the right “to practice any profession, or to carry on any occupation, trade, or business.” 

This fundamental but underrated civil right is the source of American economic freedom’s spring, which provides the guarantee that anyone may pursue any endeavor legally permitted without arbitrary government prejudice. 

While this right can certainly be restricted by legislation enacted to protect the public interest (Article 19(6)), such restrictions should always be proportional, non-discriminatory, and grounded on objective, reasonable criteria, not on an immutable moral judgment.

The Plaintiff’s Challenge to the Freedom of Profession Violation

What’s the real crux of the stingy puritanism lament is that these moves always strike, consciously, and at greatest if not lethal blows, on girls’s proper to work the place they need, particularly in service and erotic industries. 

When excessive policing results in discriminatory and premature business closures, imposes fines, and shames women staff for adhering to vague and arbitrary concepts of “inappropriate dress,” it infringes on their freedom to work and live. 

For the women who work in these industries, their jobs are increasingly becoming the only source of what would otherwise be a living wage income. They risk being laid off, which would cut their income stream overnight and subject them to social stigma.

Additionally, these discriminatory enforcement actions have a chilling effect and wide culture of intimidation and insecure employment on all entrepreneurs, discouraging them from hiring women or forcing them to adopt rigid, possibly discriminatory, look policies. 

This last one has a downstream impact not just on workers’ long-term earnings and ability to maintain a stable business from unfair competition producing economic mobility for these workers, but also on an informalization of labor, where many of the jobs displaced are pushed even further underground, where conditions are vastly more difficult to monitor and secure. 

Additionally, the lack of precise, clear-cut, and objective criteria outlined to law enforcement on what precisely qualifies as “indecent dressing” means that law enforcement officials are left with a vast degree of ambiguous, subjective power that renders enforcement arbitrary and susceptible to prejudice.

Protecting Those Rights in the Context of Regulation, Balancing Other Compelling Interests

Even if we accept the state’s broad and inherently legitimate interest in maintaining public order and preventing specific, imminent illegal actions, the intended nature and purpose of these state crackdowns directly challenge the claim that state regulation should receive unqualified immunity from constitutional scrutiny when balancing state interests against individual rights and freedoms. 

To say that a woman should choose her job for the metro based on her clothing, even when she isn’t really breaking public obscenity laws (which are different from vague ideas of “improper clothing”), seems like an unfair and excessive restriction on her right to work under Article 19(1)(g). 

To be allowed, even under strict scrutiny, any extra burden must clearly show that it serves a very important public interest that outweighs the harm or limits placed on the fundamental right, and the harm or limits must be no more severe than necessary to support that important interest.

Let’s be clear here—police motives better damn well never stray from their stated goal of defending civilians and upholding public order—but the second you begin enforcing mandates to round up “badly dressed” women from Bangalore nightclubs, that’s where it begins entering the moral policing domain. 

This approach is not only short-sighted and altogether centered on eliminating women’s means of survival, but it also violates the principle of freedom of profession laid down under Article 19 (g) of the Constitution of India. A bolder, brighter, more human, purposeful, and outcome-oriented approach that focuses on the real criminal enterprise will free the spirit of the constitution and lead us into a more just, freer, more open, and connected social world.