Months after its Kiss of Love campaign against moral policing, Kerala is in an uproar over its finance minister KM Mani allegedly accepting a Rs 1 crore bribe from bar owners to renew their licences.Last week, the Kerala High Court ruled out a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry into the accusation. Mani has refused to resign and has said he will present the budget as usual in the coming assembly session.Kerala has responded by trolling Mani.Since January 20, people from across the state have been tweeting and sending donations to Mani with the hashtag #Entevaka500, or “Here is my 500 [rupees]." Their reasoning is that if Mani is so poor that he has to ask bar owners for Rs 2 crore, then the public should help raise money for him.On Sunday, members of the Kiss of Love campaign stepped up the trolling in Kochi and took to the streets with a begging campaign. Perhaps because it was a weekend, the group seems to have collected only Rs 240, which they said they will forward to Mani.



Photo credit: Entevaka500.

#Entevaka500 began a little over a week when Malayalam director Ashiq Abu posted on Facebook that people should come together and donate crores to Mani since he was “struggling to make ends meet” and that he would start with Rs 500. The post has since acquired 18,000 likes.Like any good modern day protest, incensed Malayalis have a cross-platform social media presence. #Entevaka500 has been trending on Twitter in the state for a week now and the Entevaka500 Facebook page, started hours after Mani’s post, already has 20,000 likes.



Photo credit: Entevaka500.

The campaign reflects Kerala’s diasporic nature. From a two-year-old child in Kerala to a group in Brunei to an Afghan person calling Mani and chief minister Oomen Chandy thieves in Malayalam and Hindi, videos have been streaming in from around the world.Mani, who allegedly maintains a good relationship with Kerala’s print journalists, according to the Indian Express , seems to have been caught unawares by the enthusiasm of social media. He has not yet made a statement to the media.Money orders for amounts from Rs 10 to Rs 500 have also been streaming in from across the state. So far, the postal department has received at least Rs 15,000 in money orders, but is confounded because Mani’s residence has rejected all of them.