Jewellery brand Tanishq withdrew its ‘Ekatvam’ campaign after it ran into a storm earlier this week.
The idea behind its ads was to celebrate the coming together of communities, but many objected to the portrayal of a Hindu woman being married into a Muslim family.
A 43-second ad, released last week, showed a pregnant Hindu woman making her way to a Hindu-style style baby shower conducted by her Muslim husband’s family.
The video soon created fault lines on social media and #BoycottTanishq became a trending hashtag. What if the roles were reversed, and a Muslim woman was shown married into a Hindu family, many sought to know. They saw in it a promotion of ‘love jihad’, referring to a systematic luring of Hindu girls into marriage with Muslim men.
Tanishq soon withdrew the ad. Protesters picketed a showroom in Gujarat, and extracted an apology.
Why was the ad controversial? Rajeev Ravindranath, founder of People Design and Communication, does not see anything offensive about the ad.
“The truth in the video — of the woman being portrayed as a free-thinker and backed by her family — is completely ignored here,” he says.
Rajeev points out that it was, all said and done, an advertisement promoting a product, and it was trying to be socially relevant.
“If you are saying that the majority community in the country is threatened by what Tanishq is saying, there is a different music going on in your head. The job of the advertisement was to dramatise the truth, hint at the possibility of peace and create a conversation,” he says.
Rajeev referred to a Google search reunion ad made in 2013, which showed the connections between India and Pakistan, and was widely appreciated.
“No one made an issue… It was the mood,” Rajeev says.
He says protests against ads are not restricted to India, and in the US, Pepsi’s appropriation of the Black Lives Matter movement using an ad with Kendall Jenner faced backlash. “It’s about how it’s viewed,” he says.
Film critic M K Raghavendra says times have changed, and it is no longer possible to treat “religious differences as casually as we once did.”
“If people of different religions are shown marrying and having children, the first question that will crop up is ‘what religion will the children follow?’”, he says.
He believes people have become touchy across the board. People of all religions feel threatened in one way or another, and the casual air about religious differences has disappeared even among friends, he observes.
“The ethos of secularism was tainted to begin with, since the secular parties did not take it as staying away from religion but interfering selectively, and now it has got much worse,” he says.
He feels the Tanishq ad was tendentious, even if well-meaning. “With the right-wing in power and the public polarised as never before, people need to be extremely watchful. The government must be even-handed while dealing with violations of religious harmony but that is still far away and any stray remark could get anyone into trouble,” he told Showtime.
Rafiul Alom Rahman, founder of The Queer Muslim Project, feels that the jewellery brand taking down the ad is sending out a wrong message.
“When brands work on content like this, they should do a risk assessment. They shouldn’t have gone ahead if they didn’t have the courage to stand up for it,” he says.
Last week, Parle-G had announced it will not advertise on Indian media channels that promote hate and show aggressive and toxic content. Rafiul says, “If old brands like those can make a change and stick by it, Tanishq pulling down the ad shows regression.”
He wonders why ‘multiple realities’ can’t exist, and suspects it is part of a project to erase diversity.
“Unfortunately, a singular narrative is what works, which is that of the upper caste Hindu heterosexual man, and what he sees as patriotism, and his blind obedience to the state. That’s the only story we want the children to learn and it’s a recipe for disaster. India is a country with so many different stories,” he says. Rajeev feels brands will now be shy about commenting or having a conversation on important matters. “Hopefully there’s a way around it,” he says.