NEW DELHI (AFP) — India's Supreme Court on Friday shelved an arrest warrant issued against Hollywood heart-throb Richard Gere for showering kisses on Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty.
The move cleared the way for Hollywood's best-known Buddhist to meet next week with the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader who has lived in northern India since fleeing Tibet.
"There can be no arrest," Indira Jaising, Gere's Indian lawyer, told AFP. "He can come and go when he wants to."
Gere, who is also an AIDS activist, tightly clasped Shetty -- winner of Britain's Celebrity Big Brother reality show -- and planted kisses on her cheek in front of gaping Indian truck drivers at an awareness event in Rajasthan.
The incident last April was aired repeatedly on television and triggered a firestorm in India, where chaste public behaviour is a stern tradition, despite Bollywood's sexually suggestive song-and-dance routines.
Radical Hindus burned effigies of Gere in Mumbai and organised street rallies in New Delhi.
An Indian judge issued an arrest warrant for Gere and a summons for Shetty following a complaint accusing the pair of obscenity. The summons against Shetty was suspended last May.
Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan "stayed" the warrant issued by a court in Jaipur, capital of the northwestern state of Rajasthan, saying it was "publicity hunting".
"The court has no business to issue the arrest warrant," he said. "The case brings a bad name to the country."
But 58-year-old Gere still faces obscenity charges in Jaipur. Complaints were also filed in court against the stars in another Rajasthan town and in Ghaziabad, a satellite city of New Delhi.
"We have asked for a transfer of the cases to Mumbai," home to the Bollywood film industry, said Jaising.
Shetty, 32, has blamed India's "lunatic fringe" for the uproar.
Gere apologised last year for his exuberant display, apparently an attempt to demonstrate to the watching truck drivers that kissing was a safe activity that did not spread AIDS.
Gere left the country soon after the event and had been unable to visit India since because of the arrest warrant.
The American's audience with the Dalai Lama comes after Tibetans in India, China and Nepal launched a wave of protests to mark the 49th anniversary of the Dalai Lama's escape from Tibet after a failed uprising against Beijing's rule.
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