It was nothing more than a bit of harmless fun, but this is India, so it has become an issue of social mores and ‘Indian culture’.

So let’s talk a little about our ‘culture’ and the way we treat our women. Let’s begin with the role models from our two great epics and see how they were treated. Sita was kicked out of Rama’s palace because some gossipy old woman in Ayodhya cast aspersions on her chastity. Luckily, Sita was a goddess and could appeal to the Earth to swallow her up. In modern India, she would have ended up in a brothel or in the street. Homes for abandoned women are in short supply. The ones run by the state are so dodgy that women are better off in the street.

Then, there is Draupadi, gambled away like an old piece of furniture by one of the five husbands she was forced to marry and then stripped and humiliated in a king’s court. Krishna himself had to intervene to save her.

Let us come then to modern times. Are the men who were so offended by the kiss as to take the matter to court offended by the fact that more than 95 per cent of abortions in India are of baby girls? This well-known and very widespread practice we call ‘foeticide’ and it is marginally less cruel than infanticide. In those parts of India where ultrasound machines are not easily available, baby girls are killed to this day in horrible ways. In some districts of Tamil Nadu they are starved to death so it can take days for them to die. In other parts of our ‘civilised’ land there are other methods. Sometimes they are buried alive or poisoned with the first sip of food they get in their sad, little lives. Kinder people do it quickly by leaving it to the midwife to strangle the newborn to death.

Please do not make the mistake of thinking these things happen only in the savage wilds of rural India. In cosmopolitan Mumbai last week, a grandmother drowned her two-month-old granddaughter in a water tank. She wanted a grandson.

A recent UN report revealed that nearly half of India’s children are ‘malnourished’. We can be sure that the majority of those malnourished ones are girls, because in the average Indian home the boy gets fed first. In poorer families, it is only boys who get medical attention when they get sick. Girls are left to die. If you look at rape statistics the horror of what happens to little girls in Indian society is almost too sickening to discuss.

Something like 60 per cent of rapes in India are of children below the age of 12.

Then there is child trafficking, in which the victims are nearly always girls. As a hardboiled hack, let me say that the most disturbing story I ever did in my life was on child prostitutes in Mumbai’s brothels. Even as I write this, I see the sad, little faces of ten-year-old girls who were servicing ten and fifteen men a day and were beaten brutally if they protested. Go to any brothel in Mumbai and you will meet them still.

When that self-appointed guardian of Indian ‘culture’ went to court in Jaipur to seek satisfaction for being ‘offended’ by the kiss, did he not know that the condition of the girl child in Rajasthan is almost worse than anywhere else in India? Not only are female literacy rates among the lowest, but the last well-known case of Sati occurred less than a hundred kilometers from Jaipur. Remember Roop Kanwar, all of 18 years, and a graduate. She ‘wanted’ to commit Sati, they said afterwards, and now she is a goddess.

The ‘offended’ lawyer may only have been seeking his 15 minutes of fame, but what is more puzzling is the speed with which a Jaipur magistrate, Dinesh Gupta, admitted the case and issued a warrant for the arrest of Richard Gere because he found the kiss “highly sexually erotic” and this could “corrupt society.”

Corrupt society? How much more corrupt can it get? It will take more than 300 years to clear the backlog of cases in Indian courts. Our judges would do well to remember this when they next admit a case just because some sexually frustrated lawyer is offended by a kiss.