On Saturday evening, a group of about 300 Delhi youth decided to take their battle of love to the frontlines. They organised a "Kiss of Love" event right outside the office of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the Hindutva body that has frequently urged Indians to be wary of the creeping influence of such Western practices as young couples displaying affection in public.

“We chose the venue because the RSS enters our spaces without a second thought and violate our rights,” said Pankhuri Zaheer, an M.Phil candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University who organised the event along with three of her friends. "We are always on the defensive. We decided to show them that public places are public places."

They were inspired by similar protests in Kochi, Mumbai and Kolkata. The first Kiss of Love event was held in Kochi last Sunday, to protest against attacks by the Bharatiya Janata Party's youth wing on a cafe in Kozikhode. The members of the BJP, an affiliate of the RSS, said that the establishment's young clients were engaging in immoral activities that contravened Indian social values.

On November 2, they banded together with other hardline organisations acros religious lines to attack participants at the Kochi Kiss of Love event with sticks.

Protesting 'moral fascism'

The Delhi event, which was assembled by Facebook and other social media platforms, drew scores of young people eager to demonstrate their opposition to against what they described as “moral fascism”. On the way to the RSS office from the Jhandelwalan Metro station, though, they ran into supporters of Hindutva groups such as Bajrang Dal wearing orange bands. These groups shouted slogans against western culture and demanded that love be expressed  without “indecency”.

The police tried unsuccessfully to prevent the Kiss of Love protestors from clashing with their right-wing counterparts.  Brief scuffles followed. Towards the end of the evening, about 70 protestors were detained by the police and released soon afterwards.

But some participants in the event say that the threats haven't stopped pouring in. Among them is Dyuti Jha, a final year student at Miranda House, whose phone hasn’t stopped ringing since the protest.

“I kissed a girl and the picture went viral," she explained. "Some media houses picked it up and now people are threatening me with ugly warnings.” She has since deactivated her Facebook account to protect herself from potential attackers.

However, she declared that she would not be cowed down. "We wanted to defeat their ideology of moral fascism," said Jha. "If the public rises against moral policing, they can’t do anything.”

Going beyond kissing

Even the organisers of the event are receiving threats. "I have stopped receiving calls because my phone hasn’t stopped ringing with threatening calls," said Pankhuri Zaheer. "I am getting text messages and horrible things are being said to my family and friends."

An activist with the All India Students’ Association, Akhil Kumar clarified the idea of the protests. “We gathered to resist this renewed offensive on our freedoms in the name of culture,” he said. “It isn't just about kissing, but assertion of our rights and rejection of 'moral policing' by the self-appointed guardians of our culture.”

Queer rights activist  Gourab Ghosh, a doctorate candidate in the Jawaharlal Nehru University, agreed. The protest was a means to demonstrate that “our right to love can’t be snatched from us and we are free to do whatever we want”, he said.

On Sunday, right-wing groups attempted to counter the Kiss of Love campaign by suggesting on Twitter that they were #SickofLove. This set them up for a flurry of sarcastic retorts.