KISSA KISS KA: Richard Gere smooching Shilpa Shetty; (above); a Nayar-Hurley wedding picture(Supplied by HASTI MAN SARASWAT); (top) Mandira Bedi in her controversial sari

Pity poor Mandira Bedi. First, India crashed out of the Cricket World Cup, leaving millions of Indians dejected and not really interested in her sexy sideshow of big hair and spangled outfits. And then, when she donned a sari emblazoned with flags of all participating nations on the last day of the Cup as a final sartorial flourish, she was slapped with a criminal case for violating India’s national honour. Reason? India’s national flag happened to fall —shock, horror — somewhere in the nether regions of her sari. And the lovely Ms Bedi thought people weren’t watching her!

Truth is, a section of our countrymen — and women — are watching all the time. They are watching hard to see to it that our much vaunted culture and tradition, our oh-so-lofty maan and maryada, are not besmirched in any way. And woe betide the man, woman or foreigner who is caught thus sinning. India’s new breed of cultural vigilantes will pounce on them in no time at all. So if Calcutta’s Dilip Kumar Datta filed a criminal case against Mandira Bedi on April 30, the Richard Gere-Shilpa Shetty kiss triggered a shindig to rival a minor revolution.

A Jaipur-based lawyer, Poonam Chand Bhandari, went ahead and filed a criminal case under Section 294 of the IPC (which penalises obscene behaviour in public) against Gere, hoping that celebrities will now think twice “before behaving in a lewd way on a public stage.” Giving the case an even more bizarre twist, last week a Jaipur magistrate issued an arrest warrant against the Hollywood actor.

Not just that. One of Bhandari’s compatriots in Jodhpur, Hasti Mal Saraswat, was so stirred up by the so-called travesty that Liz Hurley and Arun Nayar made of their Hindu wedding held at the city’s Mehranhgarh Fort that he too filed a criminal case against them under Section 295A of the IPC. “They kissed in their wedding dresses,” rants Saraswat. “They made the pundit sit below them during the ceremony. They even drank alcohol while the wedding was on. Mazaak hai kya?”

Saraswat, Bhandari and Datta are members of India’s growing tribe of self-proclaimed upholders of virtue, modesty and faith. So what makes them so angry, you wonder, so ready to file criminal cases or public interest litigation at the drop of a hat — or a kiss? Are they merely chasing their 15 minutes of fame, piggybacking on some shrewd celebrity-bashing? Or are they righteousness junkies, zealots with a modern face?

Some argue that these indignant protests are prompted by a desire to subjugate women. Says Lakshmi Lingam of the Mumbai-based Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Studies, “Women are considered to be the bearers of culture and are also expected to carry the burden of culture.”

But psychiatrist Dr Debashis Roy offers another explanation: “It is undoubtedly self-gratifying when one sees a celebrity responding to a person’s action, and at the same time there is that element of approval of peers.”

Still, not all of them are the rabble rousing kind. And some of them are women. Pratibha Nathani, who had moved court recently against adult content on television, is a professor of political science in St Xavier’s College, one of the most liberal colleges in Mumbai. Predictably, she too is outraged about the Shilpa-Gere kiss. “When I saw it I thought ‘Oh my God, that man is pouncing on the girl, devouring her.’ First he started with two kisses and then he lunged towards her and we could see that she was resisting. It was in bad taste.”

Nathani, who is attractive, in her mid 30s and estranged from her husband, also finds nothing wrong with the way members of the Hindu Rashtriya Sena, a fringe Hindutva group headed by Dhananjay Desai, ransacked the Mumbai offices of Star TV last month, because the channel aired a story about an interfaith elopement. “The girl was a minor. Is Star TV a marriage bureau,” she asks.

People like Nathani often view themselves as crusaders fighting a lone battle to preserve social sanctity and order. Take Poonam Chand Bhandari, the lawyer from Jaipur who wants Richard Gere put in the slammer for planting a few kisses on Shetty. Soft-spoken and humble, he describes himself as nothing more than a vigilant citizen. “I have no vested interest behind the PILs that I file,” says the senior advocate. “It’s my sense of social duty that makes me stand up against issues.”

Bhandari insists that he’s not a publicity freak. “I’d have reacted similarly if a commoner was doing on the streets what Gere did on stage,” he says. He then launches into a discourse on his 19-year-long career as a legal eagle, recounting the several other PILs he’s filed in the past. Earlier this year, he took on the Rajasthan Cricket Association for acquiring public land from the government at a throwaway price, with the alleged intention of putting it to commercial use. He also fought a case against medical firms continuing to sell medicines that had been banned in the West. In 2006, he actually filed a PIL against judges of the very high court in which he practised, accusing them of not doing their work efficiently. “It was my most daring action,” he says. “It created a lot of problems at work, but I didn’t step back.”

Bhandari is now doing his homework on the civic status of the temples and mosques that stand in the middle of many of Jaipur’s roads. He may soon file a PIL that calls for the demolition of these structures for the benefit of Jaipur’s motorists.

Wouldn’t that lead to a riot? “I don’t care if it does,” says Bhandari. “And don’t get me wrong,” he points out. “I’m a religious man. My day never begins without offering a prayer to Ganeshji. But that doesn’t mean temples can exist in the middle of roads. They have to go.”

If Bhandari has made a career of filing PILs, for Congress activist Dilip Kumar Datta, this is his first brush with the manifold rewards of celebrity-bashing for the sake of Mera Bharat Mahan. Datta is also the president of the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust, an NGO dedicated to the “promotion of preservation and conservation of national heritage.”

Datta’s case against Mandira Bedi and Set Max, filed under The Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971, (according to the Indian Flag Code, the flag cannot be worn under the waist or on undergarments), looks set to get him enough publicity brownie points. But the man himself professes to be horrified at the thought.

“Publicity is not a factor at all as our trust is already famous in our area,” says Datta, 54, who works as a procurement officer in a private company and is also the vice-president of 71 Block Congress, south Calcutta. “Being a Congress worker, we know and understand the importance of the national flag,” he says.

But Bedi apologised, didn’t she? “So what? There is no question of withdrawing the case,” says an implacable Datta.

No less implacable is Hasti Mal Saraswat, the Jodhpur advocate who is livid over the way Hurley and Nayar supposedly made a mockery of Hindu marriage rituals. Sitting in a drawing room filled with stuffed toys, Saraswat pulls out a clutch of photographs of the wedding to substantiate his statements. It’s a miracle he’s got his hands on them — after all, no local photographer was let into the wedding, and a foreign magazine had apparently reserved the rights to the images. “I have my sources,” smiles the advocate. “I need to produce evidence in court, after all.”

Call him a sucker for publicity, and Saraswat snaps back, “I didn’t call you to my place,” he says. “You came here to interview me. And that’s because I'm already famous. I’ve earned a reputation through 20 years of hard work. I don’t need to latch onto a Hurley-Nayar wedding to hog publicity.”

Indeed, in his career as a criminal lawyer, Saraswat has represented several high-profile clients, including Maneka Gandhi in the 1980s, and Tabu, Saif Ali Khan and Salman Khan in the 1998 black buck hunting case.

But though cultural vigilantes such as Saraswat may get a kick out of filing such cases, the public at large wonder why the courts entertain so many of these “frivolous” cases. Well known Supreme Court lawyer Shanti Bhushan says if a PIL is filed, the court has no option but to list it for hearing. “However, once it comes up for the jury’s consideration, the court has every right to reject it as too frivolous. The law also has a mechanism to impose fines on people who file frivolous PILs and waste the court’s time.”

Needless to say, many of these arbiters of morality and tradition do harbour sentiments that smack of the RSS. Take Ramesh Shinde, the Mumbai head of an outfit called Hindu Jan Jagruti Samiti. This group has persistently hounded artist M.F. Husain — filing as many as 1,250 complaints against him — for allegedly defiling Bharat Mata. It is also fighting several clauses of the Anti-Superstition Bill that the Maharashtra government is trying to pass, apparently because they are against Hinduism.

Shinde is soft spoken and a qualified civil engineer who once worked with the Indian Air Force. But his RSS sympathies are overt enough. “The Muslims get more sops — while Hindu temples are taken over by the state government, madrasas come under the Wakf board and they are spared,” he says.

“I don’t understand why all those who protest against incidents like the Gere-Shilpa kiss are branded as Hindutvawadis,” says Neelam Gorhe, leader of the women’s wing of the Shiv Sena.

Well, call them cultural fundamentalists, if you will. And remember they’re always watching you.