Aryan Khan has got bail and brand Shahrukh Khan remains as strong as ever, the superpower beaming across in advertisements aired during cricket matches where fast bowler Mohammad Shami also plays, hopefully not traumatized by the trolling he faced after India lost to Pakistan, and reassured that some icons such as Sachin Tendulkar also spoke out against the attack on him. 

It’s a complicated world we all negotiate where famous Muslim names get lammed in cyber space, where places have their names changed if there is any association with Islam or Muslim rulers or just an Urdu word and where meat shops are regularly forced to shut down during Hindu festivals in some Hindi belt states and where unknown ordinary working Muslims can be boycotted, beaten or pushed out of a market for being who they are. Just this week we saw footage of protestors in Anand, Gujarat, objecting to the existence of a hotel because it had two Muslim owners besides one Gujarati Hindu Patel. Click here to read the full story.

But the thing about bigotry is that it cannot always be contained and targeted at one particular community. It spreads like a virus and there are well documented reports on the targeting smaller minorities such as Christians, just over 2 per cent of India’s population according to the 2011 census. In recent time even the Sikh community, just under 2 per cent of India’s population but concentrated in Punjab, has been depicted as anti-national because they stubbornly continue to participate and propel the protests against the farm laws. 

A bigot therefore who spends time hating “the Other” will not have very enlightened ideas about what he or she should be. They would certainly not be inspired by humanitarian or liberal ideas. This Diwali season, therefore, it is perhaps time to take note of the construct of ideas of what is Hindu and what is an insult to being Hindu. This is a relevant because several advertisements have been pulled off the air because social media trends were orchestrated to target the messaging that showcased liberal ideas of being Hindu. 

Make no mistake, the targeting of advertisements and brands comes from the same eco-system that advocates pitched hatred of minorities. The people who do so are either just thugs who have climbed on to the Hindutva bandwagon and happy to be vigilantes for the cause, or they are individuals who are deeply conservative, patriarchal and thin skinned about their religion and carry many complexes about their place in the world. They are committed to bigotry not just against minorities, but anything and everything. 

Just go through the list of advertising campaigns that have been targeted and mostly withdrawn that range from products such as Red Label Tea, Tanishq jewellery, Surf Excel and more. Many of these advertisements were attacked for showing Hindu Muslim amity that apparently causes great outrage these days. But some of the attacks were triggered by  showing a potentially liberal facet to existing Hindu traditions. The clothing brand Manyavar, for instance, that has in the past used Indian cricket captain Virat Kohli and his actor wife Anushka Sharma to sell their lines, came out with another campaign this September shot on actor Alia Bhatt. In the ad there is a play on the tradition of KanyaDaan (giving away of the daughter) and the question is posed why not KanyaMaan (respect of daughter). The idea apparently was to promote respect for the daughter instead of “donating her”. But that was seen as an insult of an old Hindu tradition and a social media campaign was organized that suggested #boycottManyavar.

This month the Dabur group that owns Fem beauty products has withdrawn an ad that shows a same sex couple who happen to be two women celebrating Karva chauth. This came on the heels of Fab-India withdrawing an advertisement for its clothing lines because it was named Jashn-e-Riwaaz which in English means celebration of tradition. In this instance BJP MP from Bangalore South Tejasvi Surya, now president of the BJP youth wing, began the storm by objecting to the use of the Urdu words Jashn-e-Riwaaz for what he believed was a Diwali collection. He tweeted that “this deliberate abrahamisation of Hindu festivals and depicting models without traditional Hindu attire must be called out. And brands like FabIndia must face economic cost for such misadventures.” 

Tejasvi Surya is seen as a rising star of the nation’s pre-eminent political party. He’s risen rapidly up the ranks obsessively searching for all things he sees as “Muslim”. It is entirely possible he knows little about language or culture in north India so let’s be generous and give him the benefit of the doubt. Would he know that the word “Ishq” meaning love or passion is drawn from Arabic and widely used in other languages of the sub-continent? Or that the other most frequently used word for love is “Mohabbat” is drawn from Persian.

Let’s forget love and move on to hate that the MP apparently has some use for and point out that in the purging of “abrahamisation” as he calls it, he is faced with quite a challenge. For in Hindi/Urdu/Hindustani we use the word “nafrat” for hate and that too is drawn from Arabic just as the origins of “dushman”, commonly used for enemy is found in Ottoman Turkish and Persian.   

In attacking what he thinks are “Muslim symbols and phrases” he is actually diminishing the ideas that have made India special. And he may have a twitter account and be in power but language is really not on his side. It would be interesting to see him fight against words that all of us, Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh use.