by Rajesh Kumar Sinha 22 October 2021
FabIndia, one of the leading and popular clothing, home furnishing and décor brands in India, recently found itself in the firing line of fast-evolving social media in the country. Known for its range of classic, aesthetically designed, ethnic clothing space, the brand, starting with a single store in 1960, today has grown into a big brand with a presence in almost all major cities in India, along with the US, Europe and middle-east. All was well but the media launch of its latest collections, titled, “Jashn-e-Riwaaz,” led to a big controversy, fueling the already volatile social media scene in the country.
Once the collections got launched, less than a month before the widely celebrated popular Indian festival of Deepawali, one came across a strange and unexpected attack on the commercial by a section of the netizens who questioned the rationale of not using the original name of the festival and instead choosing an Urdu name, suggesting it another tactic of pandering to the oft-used and misused term, ‘minority appeasement.’
The seemingly innocuous commercial saw some politicians soon getting into it and it got more attention than it would have got otherwise. The company is a commercial entity, of course, has to keep its business interests in mind. Within a few days, it came up with a clarification and withdrawal of the commercial. In its statement, the company suggested that since it comes out with varied Indian ethnic collections from time to time, the “Jashn-e-Riwaaz,” was merely one of them while the widely anticipated Deepawali collections too, will be launched soon.
While the controversy did die quite fast, it did raise some pertinent questions that need proper and objective analysis.
One, a purely independent commercial entity that specializes in promoting and marketing traditional Indian attires and has brought India a good name, why should some people try to create troubles for it…each one of us does have our own choice and preferences. If we do not like its clothes or way of presentation/marketing, we are free not to buy them. We surely are entitled to express our views on things affecting the common good but we should not go beyond a point and that red line, needs to be determined by ourselves, both individually as well as collectively as a society.
Using social media, especially Twitter that surely has not brought itself any laurels with its own share of distortion and biased usage of media, for boycotting the brand, does not send a positive signal to the business community. It suggests intimidation, coercion and everything that goes against the very basic norms of a secular democracy that India is, irrespective of what the purported experts of V-Dem say.
However, from the point of view of the protesting netizens, one cannot really brush aside the issue in this case. It is possible that the company might really have planned out a Deepawali collection, later on, close to the festival next few days though that looks a bit of an afterthought but usually so close to the festival, launching of a fresh collection in the form of “Jashn-e-Riwaaz,” seems quite unnatural. No wonder, eminent corporate executive and educationist T V Mohandas Pai, too did voice his disapproval of the company’s advertisement.
Now there could be another angle to this supposedly politico-communal campaign against the commercial. It could well be an instance of corporate rivalry that creates a bad press against the new launch of FabIndia.
In the last two years, this has been the third well-publicised instance of a commercial facing backlash of supposedly communal nature. India’s leading and highly respected jewellery brand Tanishq got trolled on social media for an advertisement that in the hindsight, promoted inter-faith marriage. Then Manyavar, another well-known clothing brand faced the flak in social media that addressed the Hindu tradition of Kanyadaan.
Such social media trolling of selected commercials suggest that they could be a part of indirect corporate warfare where rivals are trying to use simple issues to turn it into controversial and hit their rivals in the business. The biggest saving grace has been that the top politicians from the ruling party remained quiet on the issue as is expected of them.
The bigger possibility however looks like that the fast-increasing internet penetration in the country has encouraged its own share of problems. With data rates among the cheapest in the world, many people in India have started using it for dissemination of fake news, threats, intimidation to corporates/individuals/groups having some kind of perverse feeling to bring themselves in the limelight. And to make matters worse, politicians from both sides of the divide with able help from self-acclaimed intellectuals, media bigwigs, and retired bureaucrats get into the fight, projecting the perspective of only one side. Some out-of-work actors like Swara Bhaskar and her friends who share only one common trait of being anti-government, do not stop themselves from seeing the hand of the Indian government in all this. It makes the commoner confused, corporates bewildered and only politicians the happy ones.