Kangra police denies nod for Bohemia event

Lalit Mohan

Tribune News Service

Dharamsala, January 11

Kangra police has cancelled permission to organise a musical program by Pakistan-origin US based rapper Bohemia at Dharamsala. The musical event was scheduled to be held tomorrow at police ground from 12 onwards. Tickets were being sold by the organizers online for the past one month.

Roger David, better known by his stage name Bohemia, is a Pakistani American rapper and record producer. Sources here said that about 600 to 700 tickets for the event had been sold online at rates ranging from Rs 600 to Rs 1,500 by the organizers.

The permission was cancelled after much deliberation by the police authorities keeping in view the law and order situation and unorganized manner in which the event was being organized.

SP Kangra, Santosh Patial, when contacted by The Tribune, said that the organizers had moved an application before them for use of police ground for organizing a musical event for homeless children. There was no mention in the application that it was a commercial event and international artist, Bohemia was going to perform here.

Since the organizers of the event kept police in dark about the nature of the event the permission for it was cancelled today, he said.

The police and other district authorities of Kangra had been in a fix over Bohemia event since yesterday. Though the billboards of the event had been put just ahead of the mini secretariat of Dharamsala nobody took the event seriously earlier.

The authorities yesterday started getting phone call for passes for the Bohemia performance in Dharamsala. Many of the officials, while speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that they did not have much knowledge about Bohemia. However, he seemed to very popular among the younger generation as many parents started inquiring about the tickets and passes for the event.

It was then that the authorities realised that the event could attract thousands of youth from Dharamsala and even from the adjoining state of Punjab. The police then summoned the organizers of the event and found that they were grossly ill-equipped to handle the crowd that might converge to the event.

Avinash Vashisht, local coordinator for the event, said, “We were expecting a crowd of about 2,500 persons for the event. There were some lapses on our part as we failed to assess various parameters of holding the event in small place like Dharamsala”, he said. The sources here said that the organizers were trying to find an alternative location to organise the event.