Let there be more kisses

Remember the November 2, 2014 ‘Kiss of Love’ agitation in Kochi that gave the angry young generation across the country a new form of expression of protest against moral and cultural policing? A year on, it stands discredited in its place of birth. But, the relevance of the novel form of protest in increasingly intolerant Bharat is increasing by the day.

A fortnight after the first anniversary of Kiss of Love, Rahul Pashupalan and Reshmi R Nair, the young techie couple whose picture showing them kissing each other in a police van became a symbol of the protest, was arrested by Kerala Police — for alleged sex trafficking. Police says the couple was part of an internet-aided commercial sex racket that sourced customers online and supplied adult as well as under-age women to rich clients at five-star hotels.

In a raid on an upmarket hotel near the Kochi airport, Reshmi and two under-age women were trapped while going to meet the clients, who turned out to be plainclothes police. Reshmi had come to the hotel at midnight with her six-year-old son in tow. Pashupalan and a few others were arrested shortly after.

The Crime Branch police had been snooping on the racket for a month as part of its ‘Operation Big Daddy’ investigating online sex rackets. Pashupalan had reportedly told the investigators that he and his wife had joined the racket seven months back to find money to pay off the huge debts he had incurred after making a film. Reshmi, who used to be a bikini model, alleged that Pashupalan had forced her into the sex trade.

The couple’s arrest immediately triggered a barrage of I-told-you-so reactions from the moral police who had opposed Kiss of Love because it was “against Indian traditions”. To them, the arrest exposed the ‘immorality’ of the kissing agitation. The “immoral and criminal life” of the couple, who had been in the forefront of the campaign, was proof that Kiss of Love was wrong and the moral policing incident that provoked the agitation was right. Kissing in public was against the grain of Indian tradition. The cultural right could not conceal its glee.

After the arrest, the rapidly shrinking space of individual freedom has become tinier. It will now be a little harder for people to protest against cultural fascism and moral policing.

True, Rahul Pashupalan and his wife — educated, daring, young people with decent jobs — have, with their alleged involvement in the sex racket, deeply damaged a great cause and a novel way to uphold it. They hurt the credibility of the scores of young people who had participated in the protest against the violation of individual freedom and their chosen tool of protest. But the arrest is definitely not a repudiation of the stand of the protest’s rivals. Pashupalan was not the ‘leader’ of the protest movement, though, being articulate, he had emerged as an interface between the curious media and the protesters. The arrest of two active members of a spontaneous movement does not mean that the entire protest movement and the tool employed to highlight the protest were wrong.

On the contrary, the series of murders of intellectuals as well as beef-eaters in the one year since Kiss of Love, and the rising wave of intolerance of others’ way of life and individual freedoms, have shown that the protesters were on their right track. Recall how scores of writers, artists and filmmakers expressed their protest in their own ways — by returning their awards and honours. And, think of Aamir Khan and the intolerance to the protest against intolerance. Kiss of Love was the right response, and at the right time, to the outrageous moral policing that had intruded into individual freedom. It has, over the past year, emerged as a form of nonviolent democratic protest that has inspired the youth. For students on campuses in many parts of the country, Kiss of Love has become an inspiration for speaking up in other contexts where freedoms and rights have been challenged. Well, the November 2 public kiss in Kochi , more of a symbolic act, had upset the socially conservative. But, what better form of protest could there be? Note that kissing in public is a normal expression of love, not just in the “immoral West” but in many great oriental cultures, including China.

The Kochi event was like a flash mob which had responded to the online call of the ‘freethinkers’ website to protest against an outrage in the name of protecting Indian traditions. A week before the event, members of a right-wing outfit had attacked a restaurant at Kozhikode.

The reason: a young couple was kissing at the restaurant. The outfit had apparently taken a leaf out of the moral-policing incidents in some parts of the neighbouring Karnataka.

Scores of young people as well as thousands of peeping Toms gathered at the Kochi waterfront that day. But outfits such as the Shiv Sena and the police saw to it that not much kissing took place.

One year on, and after the Dabholkar, Kalburgi and Dadri lynching, Kiss of Love seems like a moral, sane and appropriate form of protest, Pashupalan notwithstanding. Let there be more ‘Kiss of Love’ events!

Tailpiece: One of the jokes on the Malayalam social media on Pashupalan’s arrest bears the mark of our times: “Pashupalan will be let off by the police because the central government will certainly intervene...there is a cow in his name” ( pashu is Malayalam for cow).