Kiss of Love won’t lose fizz
The arrest of Rahul Pasupalan and wife Resmi R. Nair will not take away the relevance of the movement, is the predominant opinion
By : elizabeth thomas
Update: 2015-11-19 23:17 GMT
Last year, on November 2 to be precise, when thousands of people gathered at Marine Drive in Kochi to kiss en masse against moral policing, in protest against the moral policing incident at Downtown restaurant in Kozhikode, it created history.
Hailed as ‘Kiss of Love’, it caught the attention and imagination of everyone, especially the youngsters, for its unique mode of protest — to kiss in public.
Media in Kerala and outside celebrated what was portrayed as a modern-day ‘freedom movement’. It pitchforked two faces — Rahul Pasupalan and his wife and model Resmi R. Nair — to instant fame, who virtually took over as the spokespersons of the movement.
They graced social media chat groups and television channel discussions as the torchbearers of a new morality whose time seemed to have appeared a tad too soon to a state still caught in conventional mores.
Resmi and Rahul
Exactly a year later, the couple were arrested for commercial sex trade and the charges include trafficking of minors. The critics of the movement surfaced with their ‘I told you so’ comments while the web was full of trolls. The inevitable question on most people’s minds being, ‘was Kiss of Love a fake movement? Now that the main two players have been exposed, does it have any future?
Most of those who took part and supported the movement insist that the movement is still relevant even if Rahul and Resmi may have used it for their evil interests.
According to Jolly Chirayath, one of the organisers of the event, the movement will not die because of the arrests. “Kiss of Love is not a movement that sprang up from Facebook one day.
That was the culmination of various protests that have been going on for long against moral policing and gender discrimination. We are still battling these issues. So, it is still significant,” she says adding that the movement is not centered on a particular person.
She adds: “Four days before the event, Rahul and Resmi came to us and sought our support. They had limitations to conduct this event as they lacked organisational skills. We formed Purogamana Janathipathya Koottayma, and it was under this banner the movement took place. We supported them because of the cause it upheld,” explains Jolly.
However, after the programme, Jolly felt a change in Pasupalan’s attitude, as he shifted opinions. “That time, I felt that he lacked personal integrity. But, we have never anointed him as the apostle of Kiss of Love. It was the media that gave them that status. And, now, by equating their arrest with Kiss of Love, media is not focusing on child trafficking, which is the major issue here. Interestingly, it was those who participated in this movement, who had reported about the page ‘Kochu Sundari’ to the cyber cell, without knowing that these two were involved in that,” she says.
Writer Sarah Joseph, who had supported the movement, opines that Kiss of love may not have much significance in the future. “Even while participating in it, I didn’t feel that Kiss of Love would sustain itself. It was significant then and it was a strong symbolic protest. But, I knew that it was short-lived. Though the duo kicked off the movement, it was nurtured by the public, who were annoyed by moral policing and intervention of others into one’s sexual freedom. If the recent development is correct, it’s time to redefine our sexual freedom, which only conveys that a person holds the right to his sexuality, correctly. If people exploit sexual freedom like this, it will lead to anarchy. We should check that,” she says.
Rahul Easwar is someone who had opposed the movement. However, he too feels that the relevance of Kiss of Love may not be affected by the arrests. “I don’t think that the idea is false, because I am also against moral policing. I opposed it then as I couldn’t agree with the mode of protest they adopted. That was an extreme way of protest. But, I don’t think that we should eternally hate them. We should provide rehabilitation to them. Our attitude should be ‘hate the sin, not the sinners’.”
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