Feeling the heat from across sections of the society, the proposed controversial programme, ‘Kiss of love’, has been put off indefinitely in the State Capital.
The organisers of the event, Mohsin Khan and Varun Namdeo, while talking to The Pioneer on Saturday, said, “After persuasion from people of different walks of life including administration that the atmosphere of the city could be disturbed, we have decided to withhold the event for now. Moreover, we were not getting permission for the event.”
Khan further said, “Whatever we wished to do was within frame of law and we never wanted to violate any law that is why when we were told that some anti- social elements could enter in our programme to disturb the peaceful atmosphere of the city we decided to withhold it.”
He said that the aim of the event was never to confront with society. “We never said that we would lodge any sort of protest; our programme was a teaser to awaken the society against the increasing moral policing and to mobilize public support from the society against the moral policing.”
Namdeo said, “The media has painted the programme with wrong colours and is not ready to take note of our perspective for it. We just took the name ‘Kiss of love’ from Kochi and Delhi protest, but the design of our proposed teaser was entirely different, it was not kissing in public and the like as propagated by the media. We only wished to promote freedom of expression within the framework of society limits, we understand the limits of Indian society and we were not going to hurt sentiments of anyone,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Superintendent of Police (SP), Bhopal North, Arvind Saxena, said that he had told the organisers to put off the programme as it could disturb the peace of the city as all the religious communities were against it. They agreed and called off the protest, he added.