Ads the Hurt Religious Sentiments
Advertisements are one of the main tools for promoting a brand both online and offline, even today. And needless to say, these ads depict situations and scenarios from the everyday world using cues from social situations to make people aware of how a particular brand fits in with their daily lives.
However, in a country as culturally diverse as India, it can be tricky to execute certain ads. The problem with such creations is that they aren’t always interpreted the way the creators wanted them to be. Indian masses especially nowadays have become less tolerant or accepting when it comes to such creative expressions. One can call it the rigidity of the norms, beliefs, or traditions that have been conditioned and internalized within the society, or the fact that diversity is deeply seated within the country. Either way, both have led to a lot of controversies over a variety of advertisements. Even the top advertising agencies of the country and beyond have always been under public scrutiny.
From being sexually inappropriate to showing a particular ethnic or religious community in a supposedly questionable light, advertisements have always been under excessive scrutiny. Sometimes, even promoting healthy societal cultures has come in the firing line, as it is looked upon as breaking the tradition or the customary societal do’s and don’ts. In today’s world of intolerance, even the thought of uniting forces with members of another community seems like a threat to their existence and hence not a day goes by without a community or religion feeling offended.
Let us look at such ads that have offended religious sentiments:
Jawed Habib:
Habib’s ad featuring the Hindu Goddess Durga and her four children in their salon enjoying a spa day didn’t settle well with the audience. The Hindu community was enraged about why it was always their Gods and Goddesses who were mocked in advertisements. Things went to such an extent that Jawed Habib was even accused of having hurt Hindu sentiments on purpose, with him being labelled as a Rohingya Muslim across social media. He had to apologize to the community while assuring them that he had no intention of hurting the sentiments of any community.
Zomato’s wordplay trouble:
The food delivery chain was also not spared from controversy. In this ad Hrithik is heard saying a certain line: “Thaali khane ka mann tha, Mahakaal se manga liya (wanted to have a food platter, so I ordered it from Mahakaal)”. This one line has caused controversy as priests in Ujjain and many Hindu viewers could not tolerate this line well and asked Zomato and Hrithik Roshan to apologise for this ad and declared the ad as misleading and hurtful. In fact, #BoycottZomato was also trending on Twitter in India to protest against Zomato’s ad. However, in their defence, Zomato clarified that the ad was created based on facts that the thaali is the most popular item in the region and when they said ‘Mahakal’, they were actually referring to a restaurant named Mahakal and not the temple. Zomato and Hrithik Roshan both apologized and Zomato took down the ad.
NGO, Save the Children:
An ad campaign in 2013 that aimed at raising awareness of domestic abuse received criticism from both Hindus and feminists. The three ads commissioned by an NGO, Save The Children, and created by Mumbai-based ad agency Taproot, earned awards, but faced flak in public. Depicting Hindu goddesses Saraswati, Lakshmi and Durga as victims of abuse, the posters state, “Tomorrow it seems like no woman shall be spared. Not even the ones we pray to, too.” While Hindus were offended at the inappropriate representation of their gods, feminists said that it led to the “deification of women”. Feminists were outraged by the idea that women had to be considered as goddesses in order to be saved, and not as people.
Patanjali:
Baba Ramdev’s Patanjali ad a few years back attracted flak from a group of Christians in Bhopal. The television ad was released on Independence Day, and called for a boycott of foreign products, highlighting the Swadeshi movement of the pre-independence days. At 00:17, the clip shows three crosses with the letters E, I and ‘Co’ in between (meaning the East India Company), while the voice-over warns about the dangers of foreign products. The Christian group, Sarva Isai Mahasabha, claimed that while they supported the cause of promoting Indian-made products, they felt the depiction was “directly pointed at Christians and that has hurt us”.
Fabindia:
Diwali is one of those festivals in India that brands try to promote in new ways every year. But when FabIndia tweeted about one of its Diwali collections and called its campaign ‘Jashn-e-riwaaz’,it got the most unexpected flak from a lot of netizens. Some Hindus accused Fabindia of ‘Abrahamising’ the Hindu religious practices and thousands tweeted to boycott Fabindia. Though Fabindia had to take down its tweet, the campaign dented the brand’s profits in FY 21-22.
Tanishq Ekatvam:
Tanishq has been in troubled waters quite often recently. One of its ads, Ekatvam (oneness), which was presumably launched to capitalize on the festive season of Diwali, was tethered to a caption on YouTube that read, ‘She is married into a family that loves her like their own child. Only for her, they go out of their way to celebrate an occasion that they usually don’t. A beautiful confluence of two different religions, traditions, cultures.’ In spite of attempting to achieve this beautiful confluence, thousands of India’s netizens didn’t seem to see it that way, taking to Twitter and other internet platforms to express their displeasure. The ad was subsequently made private on YouTube before being pulled together by Tanishq. Within hours of the ad’s release, the hashtag #BoycottTanishq began trending and by Monday afternoon the YouTube video had garnered over 2,000 dislikes and just 500 likes. The main criticism levelled at the ad was that it promoted so-called ‘love jihad’, a controversial term used to refer to interfaith relationships. Many also questioned the choice to feature a Hindu daughter marrying into a Muslim family rather than the other way around.
