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Dance girls in Mumbai  protest against the government's action.

The famous bar girls of Mumbai are dusting off their dancing shoes after the state High Court overturned a government ban on dance bars introduced nine months ago.

The court ruled the law was an unreasonable restriction that was not in the public interest, and one that violated the constitutional right to equality of bar dancers and bar owners.

The ruling follows a prolonged and vocal campaign by bar owners, dancers, social activists and non-government organizations to have the law rescinded and the bars reopened in the Bollywood city that is India's entertainment capital.

The decision is an embarrassment for the Government of Maharashtra state, which introduced the ban saying the state's 1,250 dance bars were immoral, obscene, and a breeding ground for crime and prostitution.

After the decision was handed down, bar owners and former dancers celebrated outside the High Court, hugging each other and sending text messages to colleagues who had left the business.

Indian Bar girls perform

"I was preparing to leave for Dubai next week," Seema said. "But now I may cancel it. The bar-owner just called me up and told me he would pay the same amount I would have got abroad."

Bar owners were obviously relieved that they would be able to return to work. Former dancers said they were desperate to lift themselves and their families out of the poverty that had descended upon them after the bars were closed.

While overjoyed by the High Court's decision, many in the industry have been unable to understand why the ban was introduced at all, since there was no public pressure to close the bars, which had been an integral part of Mumbai's vibrant nightlife for the past 30 years.

Suketu Mehta, journalist and author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, has described the Mumbai dance bars as "the intersection of everything that makes the city fascinating: sex, death, love and show business."

In the dance bars, young women shake their stuff on stage to recorded Hindi film music.

The women wear, as Mehta put it, "more clothes that the average Bombay secretary." The men, who are not allowed to touch or dance with the women, shower them with various denominations of rupee notes in appreciation.

But the dancing girls are not putting on their boogie shoes just yet. Before they can reopen their bars, owners must procure a performance licence, which is issued by the State Government.

Even if there are no hitches, the licences could still take eight weeks to be issued, when, no doubt, the Government will be preparing its appeal to the Supreme Court.

The ban had affected more than 100,000 women who worked in some 1,400 bars across the state of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital.

More than half of them had become jobless overnight and many were forced into prostitution to survive.