Vote in the name of love

This appeared recently in the WSJ India Real Time blog as Indian Political Party’s Unique Platform: Love

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Kumar Sri Sri, whose beaming face is still plastered across the city of Chennai on posters left over from assembly elections earlier this year, says his party aims to work for the “success of lovers.”

In the elections in Tamil Nadu state, he ran for the first time ever, from the Chennai suburb of T Nagar and got just 3,000 votes, losing by a massive margin to the AIADMK candidate Mr. V.P. Kalairajan.

But it’s early days yet for his Indian Lovers Party, which Kumar Sri Sri, 34, founded on Valentine’s Day in 2008.

In a country where many parents are still reluctant to allow their children to choose their own spouses or marry across caste lines—and where defiant lovers have sometimes been killed for doing so—Mr. Kumar’s aim is simple. Where on Valentine’s Day, vandals stone shop windows selling romantic cards and beat up unmarried couples seen together, Kumar spends the day distributing sweets to canoodling couples on Chennai’s Marina beach.

For Kumar, “love marriage” is the great equalizer, the panacea for India’s social ills. “Lovers do not notice caste, rich or poor, dark or fair,” he says earnestly. To reinforce this claim, he also says that in the West, all marriages are love matches, which is why Western society is free of problems arising from caste and class considerations.

For all this talk about love, Kumar has a clear political roadmap in place. Although he is keen to make it clear that his heart truly belongs to this cause, he also readily admits that he adopted this platform as a foolproof way of garnering immediate attention for his party. He says that he has attracted over 100,000 supporters to his party so far, many of them youngsters.

Kumar Sri Sri, who was formerly Babu Kumar until an astrologer suggested he add the “Sri Sri” to his name to improve his fortunes, has been lucky enough to find love himself. He married his longtime sweetheart Mangala Devi in 2001 after courting her for ten long years, and with her support, he launched the Indian Lovers Party.

Kumar takes great care to ensure that he helps only “genuine lovers,” or couples who are both of legal age and want to get married to each other. He has conducted over fifteen such weddings so far and in other cases, has mediated with the parents on both sides to convince them. “I will be sitting in some jail now if I support wrong things,” he says with a laugh.

As part of his strategy to enter politics at a national level, Kumar has been trying to make his presence felt in other states. For starters, he is addressing a meeting in Hyderabad later this month to declare his support for a movement to create a new state of Telangana out of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. He is also headed to Delhi within the next two months to register with the Election Commission (at present, he is registered with the state election commission). He has planned a side trip to Agra then: “I want to see the Taj Mahal and to make sure that all lovers see it once in their lifetime.”

The monument to love is a prominent motif in his party flag, naturally, where it appears enclosed within a heart, complete with an arrow running through it. Mr. Kumar is clearly a man who does not believe in leaving anything unsaid: The heart is bordered in pink (“rose is the universal color of love”), orange (“for Hindus”) and green (“for Muslims”).