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Love Commandos : Policing those who police love

Some do it to uphold the right to love while others do so to defend the freedoms of expression. Amrita Madhukalya talks to some who go the extra mile to ensure that expressions of love are not a casualty

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Sanjay Sachdev (centre) with the Love Commandos team
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It was an unusually warm afternoon late last year when armed special police and encounter specialists from Uttar Pradesh took over a suburban Delhi locality, combing through the streets to look for a 22-year-old whose only offence seemed to be that he had fallen in love with the daughter of an influential liquor baron in Agra. The young couple had eloped and taken refuge with the Love Commandos, an organisation that helps lovers on the run, and the situation steadily turned more volatile.

"If Delhi Police had not stepped in at the right moment, our corpses would have figured in the dailies the next day," remembers Sanjay Sachdev, journalist and Love Commandos chief. "The Agra police had illegally used mobile tower surveillance that usually requires a government permit and a home secretary clearance to track us down," he says, adding that the incident had exposed one of their shelters in the city.

Love Commandos was formed in July 2010 following a fake rape case being slapped against a man, Sachdev says. "The girl went on record to say that she was not a minor, and that their relationship was consensual. She even refused to undergo a medical test. Yet, the police attested to the statement given by the girl's father."

The man procured bail and Love Commandos was formed a few days later. In four- and-a-half years, the force has helped thousands of couples. They have seven dedicated apartments which shelters couples on the run. Apart from that, they can also hide couple in 300 houses of some of those they have helped save.

"Some live here for a few hours, while some stay with us for months," says Sachdev. He adds that finances are a persistent problem. It takes them between Rs.8 lakh-Rs.12 lakh each month to run the shelters. But support has spiralled since actor Aamir Khan featured them in an episode of his popular show Satyamev Jayate last year.
Unlike Sachdev, Sukhesh Vadavil says that the Kiss Of Love campaign he and a few friends spearheaded in Kochi was more in the defence of their freedom than in the defence of love. When a Calicut restaurant was vandalised by Yuva Morcha goons because visuals of young couples making out was released by a TV channel, Sukhesh and a few friends who were part of a Facebook group decided that enough was enough. "If they had a problem with people kissing, we thought why not go and kiss in front of them," says Vadavil. So, the group invited people for a march to Kochi's Marine Drive to kiss publicly.

The Kiss of Love campaign gave way to several chapters across the country. Groups led similar campaigns in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pondicherry, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai and Jadavpur. "The problem is not as much with watching people kiss in public as much as it is in letting a woman chose her own fate. Letting a woman exert control over who she chooses to sleep with or marry is scary," says Vadavil.

This Valentine's Day, these campaigners launched the Write a Love Letter campaign against a Hindu Mahasabha diktat that unmarried couples professing love to each other in public or in social media will be married off.
The diktat also invited the ire of the guys behind the Shuddh Desi Romance campaign. These activists, who wanted to remain anonymous, have planned to reach the Hindu Mahasabha office in Delhi in full marriage attire in defiance. "A lot of our LGBTIQ friends are also planning to turn up. If the Hindu Mahasabha is generous enough, why not get married?," says the voice on the other side of the phone. "The idea is not as much as to assert our right to celebrate Valentine's Day as it is to assert our rights to public places, our right to protest, and our right to chose our life partners," she says. "We have every right to love."

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