WHEN RICHARD GERE planted a kiss on actress Shilpa Shetty’s cheek at an AIDS/HIV rally several weeks ago, he sparked a hissy fit by India’s moral police that has claimed another high-profile victim. Bollywood’s undisputed queen Aishwarya Rai was summoned to a district court last week to defend an “obscene” kissing scene in her latest movie “Dhoom II,” a follow-up to the 2004 blockbuster.

With impressive thoroughness, the Bihar district court not only summoned Rai and her co-star Hrithik Roshan to appear on May 30, but also the director, the producer, and even the owners of the theater which ran the movie. The obscenity which caused all this fuss? A brief peck on the cheek. Rai has not yet responded to the court order, no doubt weighing her words carefully in a political environment where the wrong turn of phrase might well lead to a rash of effigy burning.

Meanwhile, Richard Gere’s smooching debacle is far from over. A district court in Rajasthan has issued arrest warrants for both Gere and Shilpa Shetty, his unwilling accomplice in forever tarnishing the honor of India.

Gere arrived in Delhi last month to highlight the nation’s growing HIV epidemic, but wound up drawing world attention to the nation’s public moralizing epidemic instead. The aging celebrity made a hokey attempt to connect with his audience (4,000 truckers from one of India’s most high-risk demographics for HIV transmission), dipping Shetty in a parody of his movie “Shall We Dance?” before planting several pecks on her cheeks.

Hindu fanatics staged protests in Varanasi, Bhopal, Kanpur, Indore, and Delhi. In Delhi and Mumbai, the protests were led by conservative Shiv Sena activists; in Indore, by the nationalist BJP party. Radicals mobs burned straw effigies of Gere in the streets of Mumbai.

And when I say “radical mobs,” of course, I mean a couple of dozen men out of a population of 1 billion, give or take. However, these small groups are busy creating an image of India in the international press as a place where public debates are hashed out over blazing straw-men, in this case quite literally. Many Indians at home and abroad are displeased that the actions of a few fringe protestors are splashed all over the pages of the international media.

REPEAT OFFENDER: Gere stealing a kiss; gettin’ his freak on with JLo in “Shall We Dance?”; and waltzing Japan’s former PM.

Gere began with an apology tendered to his “dear Indian friends” for “a naive misread of Indian customs,” before defending Shetty. “Shilpa Shetty is a courageous and wonderful woman who deserves high praise and support for her singular leadership against HIV/AIDS. I have utmost respect for her, and she knows this. Of course, I have felt terrible that she should carry a burden that is no fault of hers.”

When the media hoopla refused to blow over, Gere took a different tack. “There is a very small, right-wing, very conservative political party in India, and they are the moral police in India and they do this kind of thing quite often,” he explained on “The Daily Show.”

Despite being tackled twice—once by Gere and once by the BJP—Shetty has handled the fiasco with admirable poise.

Shetty explained to PTI (the Indian equivalent of the AP): “I understand this is his culture, not ours. But this was not such a big thing or so obscene for people to overreact in such manner.” To those seeking to distract attention from the event’s proper focus, Shetty asks, “I want to know from the media and people giving reactions, ‘What have they done for the cause [of fighting AIDS]?’”

She also appealed to India’s international reputation as a hospitable place: “I understand people’s sentiments, but I don’t want a foreigner to take bad memories from here,” PTI quoted her as saying. “If protecting Indian culture and tradition means burning our effigies, please go ahead and carry on with your protests. But, our culture also teaches us to imbibe ‘Atithi Devo Bhava,’” she said, quoting familiar expression that “the guest is god.”

Three separate citizens filed legal complaints against Gere and Shetty under the Obscenity Act which limits public displays of affection. Of course, these lawsuits exist solely for publicity—naturally, no one expects that Miss Shetty will be filming her next romance from inside a jail cell. In a nation with a staggering backlog of legitimate legal cases, it is unfortunate that attention-seekers should see fit to file nuisance lawsuits against celebrities, particularly aging leading men who are devoting their golden years to public health causes in India.

Happily, more level heads still prevail among India’s civil servants. Former attorney general Soli Sorabjee was quoted as saying, “The order is ridiculous. Even if this hugging and kissing was a bit vulgar, it does not amount to obscenity.” And Supreme Court senior advocate Dushyant Dave confided in the Times of India that “This is only for cheap publicity and the magistrate and lawyer should be restrained.”

(The complainant, Shailendra Dwivedi, has a long history of filing cultural suits, including one against painter M. F. Husain for a series of nude paintings of Hindu goddesses. Dwivedi is only one of many Indian reactionaries with the curious habit of filing lawsuits over incidents in which they played no part—see the similar suit filed against Elizabeth Hurley).

As one might expect, Shetty is getting her fair share of blame, despite the fact that she had nothing to do with Gere’s awkward embrace. A judge ordered her to appear in court on May 5 to explain why she did nothing to resist the kiss in language uncomfortably reminiscent of that used in many Indian rape trials, where women still often bear the blame—socially, if not legally—for harassment and assault.

And who’s next? The recent star of the Abhi-Ash wedding extravaganza, the former Miss Rai, who is being sued along with her co-star, the producer, and the director. Rai—who, in addition to changing her last name, is moving in with her husband’s family in keeping with tradition—has spent her entire career skirting the line between traditional Indian womanhood and modern celebrity. Now rumor has it that her in-laws are angry about Rai’s kiss scene from “Dhoom II.” This despite the fact that their son, Abhishek Bachchan, has had his fair share of onscreen kisses, a classic double standard.

A dry peck on the cheek hardly seems like much compared to the frankly seductive poses that are the norm for Bollywood dance sequences. But a kiss—in particular a public kiss—plays by different rules. Sexy dance sequences draw on a long history of erotic postures, but kissing is seen as uniquely “western,” and therefore encroaching on India’s native culture.

Nationalists are increasingly hostile to western romantic concepts. The increase in kissing in Bollywood films is one such example; an increase in western-style courtship is another. The recent spate of indecency lawsuits only underscores India’s worrying nationalist leanings. Not surprisingly, it is the young men of the BJP that have placed the burden of upholding all of Indian culture on women’s shoulders—or lips.

India has a long and admirable history of intellectual argument and political debate, but apparently kissing is not a protected form of speech. In the future, citizens of the world’s largest democracy may be safer protesting with their mouth open and not closed. •

Summer Block Kumar is a freelance writer and critic living in Shanghai.