Bangla lawmaker criticised for hauling up students kissing in park

Dhaka: Bangladeshi lawmaker Ekramul Karim Chowdhury has been slammed online for calling the police on teenage lovers kissing in a park and posting their photos on social media in the socially conservative country.

Ekramul Karim Chowdhury posted photos of the 18 teenagers to on, where they quickly garnered thousands of comments. But most users criticised him for his attempt at moral policing and for publishing images of the teens on the internet.

“It’s not an MP’s duty to police people roaming in the parks,” Facebook user Fakhrul Islam wrote shortly after their images appeared, Tuesday.

The lawmaker, who represents southern Noakhali district in Bangladesh, later deleted the post. He said he did not ‘understand social media well’ and should have hidden the couples’ faces.

“I saw some of them kissing in a public park while I was passing by. That’s obscenity I will not tolerate in my constituency,” Ekramul Karim Chowdhury told this agency.

Chowdhury defended his actions and said he did the right thing and would continue his ‘campaign’ against obscenity. “I welcome the criticisms. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know what people are thinking,” Chowdhury said.

Local police chief Nabir Hossain said the students were handed over to their parents. “We told the students not to go to parks and skip school… It’s not good for them,” he added.

Kissing in public is a big social taboo in the Muslim majority nation. But then the country is slowly turning modern as the incident suggests.

PTI