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India
This Week in AsiaPolitics

‘Love Jihad’: India’s Tanishq pulls heartfelt interfaith jewellery advert after backlash from Hindu nationalists

  • Hindu nationalist trolls claimed the ad was part of a conspiracy that purports Muslim men only marry women of other faiths to convert them
  • Controversy surrounding the ad, which portrayed a baby shower, comes against a backdrop of rising interfaith tensions under PM Narendra Modi

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A still from Tanishq‘s pulled ’Ekatvam’ advert shows the pregnant Hindu wife character being escorted to her baby shower by an older Muslim woman she calls mother. Photo: YouTube
Akanksha Singh
One of India’s largest jewellery store chains has come under fire after posting an advert online that portrayed an interfaith couple’s baby shower.
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The advert by Tanishq, titled “Ekatvam” (unity), features a Hindu-Muslim couple in what is supposed to be a tender testament to universal love. In it, a pregnant Hindu woman is escorted to her baby shower by an older Muslim woman she calls Ma (mother).

At the end of the video, the young woman asks the older woman, who is apparently her mother-in-law, “But this [baby shower] tradition isn’t held at your home?” The mother-in-law, whose head is covered with a scarf, replies, “Isn’t it a tradition for every home to keep [their] daughters happy?”

Not everyone who watched the advert was happy, however. Right-wing trolls flocked to it in their droves to denounce its “fake secularism”, with some saying they felt it “promoted love jihad” – a term frequently used by Hindu nationalists to allege a conspiracy in which Muslim men marry women from other religions solely to convert them to Islam.

India has become increasingly Hindu-nationalist since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power. Photo: AFP / Indian Press Information Bureau
India has become increasingly Hindu-nationalist since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power. Photo: AFP / Indian Press Information Bureau
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Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party first came to power in 2014, India has become increasingly Hindu-nationalist. Religious intolerance has grown, with Hindu mobs lynching dozens of Muslims and lower-caste Dalits for consuming or slaughtering cows, which Hindus consider sacred. The BJP and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, explicitly want India to become a Hindu rashtra or Hindu nation-state, despite Muslims and people of other faiths account for some 240 million, or one-fifth, of the populace.
The hashtag #BoycottTanishq started trending on Indian Twitter on Monday. By Tuesday, as news broke that the Tata-owned jewellery company would be pulling its ad, commenters had gone so far as to compare the advert’s message to the attack by Islamic extremists on the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. One poster accused Tanishq of “targeting” Hindus on account of it being “antinationalist”, while another, in response to a tweet asking if the level of outrage would have been the same if the religions portrayed in the advert were reversed, said, “I don’t know ma’am. We could have asked the folks at Charlie Hebdo, but they’re dead.”
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