Tanishq might have quietly taken down its love jihad ad video from YouTube, but the company’s showrooms are going a step further to mollify their irate customers.
A Tanishq showroom in Gujarat has put up an apology outside its store for the Love Jihad ad which was released on YouTube. “The advertisement which is running in media today is shameful, thus, Tanishq Gandhidham apologizes to whole Kutch district Hindu society,” the message reads.
This is the first public apology from Tanishq, which has been at the center of a social media storm over its ad which showed a Hindu woman being welcomed into a Muslim home. Netizens had accused the ad of promoting love jihad, and endangering young women by providing them a false sense of what an inter-faith marriage could involve. Over a lakh tweets with the hashtag ‘Boycott Tanishq’ had been sent, and many people had vowed to never buy from Tanishq again.
The company had responded by quietly taking down the ad from its YouTube channel, but it appears that showrooms on the ground that better understand the pulse of their customers are going a step further, and directly apologizing to their customers.
The outrage around the ad was understandable — over the last few years, hundreds of Hindu women have been converted or killed after marrying into Muslim households. There are also cases in which men have pretended to be Hindu and lured women into marrying them, and then forced them to convert to Islam. The problem has been exacerbated in recent times — OpIndia reported that 20 cases of love jihad had been reported in just the last two months, and 11 cases were reported from Kanpur alone. Things have come to such a head that the Uttar Pradesh government is mulling a ordinance to check the barbaric practice, and the Assam government has said that it’ll take serious measures to fight love jihad in its state.
