Model-cum-activist Resmi R Nair and her partner Rahul Pashupalan, leaders of Kiss of Love agitation, aprotest that “rocked” Kerala and other parts of the country in 2014, are in trouble as the Crime Branch of Kerala Police filed chargesheet against them under various charges ranging from online sex rackets, trafficking women and minor girls and using them for prostitution.
The duo had formed an online community and social media collective for flesh trade and the police took four years to decipher the encrypted data.
The Kiss of Love , of which Resmi and Rahul were the main promoters, was staged in protest against the moral policing unleashed across Kerala and Tamil Nadu by a section of Hindu and Islamic organisations which questioned and opposed kissing and hugging by lovers in public.
The duo of Resmi-Rahul succeeded in drawing hundreds of thousands of youth and middle aged couples to the streets on November 2, 2014 to take part in the public demonstration of love and passion.
Though the agitation passed of smoothly, the couple was held by the Crime Branch Police of Kerala as part of “Operation Big Daddy”, a mission launched to prevent child trafficking and sex trade.
They were arrested in 2015 from a hotel near Cochin International Airport while engaged in trafficking and sex trade using children brought from Bangalore and
Chennai. According to the chargesheet accessed by this newspaper, Resmi and Rahul (CPI(M) activists) and 11 others were caught for trafficking girls and forcing them into prostitution.
They have been charged under relevant sections of the IPC, IT Act and POCSO Act.
A senior official of the Crime Branch said from the State capital that the police had collected adequate evidence including digital evidence against the two ‘love birds’ and their associates.
“Operation Big Daddy” was launched in 2015 to curb the menace of the flourishing sex trade in the State and the first two persons to be arrested were Resmi and Rahul.
Officials in Crime Branch said that the delay in filing the chargesheet was because of the time taken to collect the digital evidence which were in the form of high level encrypted data.
The Forensic Science Laboratory of the Kerala Police could mot decipher this encrypted data and we had to seek the services of Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) for th same.
This was a time consuming process and hence the delay,” said an official. He said that Resmi and Rahul were the master brains behind the inter-State sex racket and they had hored the services of goondas to take care of the smooth conduct of the business.
