Tanishq Ad | We were un-secular before, too. We will stay secular even now

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Good that jewellery-maker Tanishq pulled back that advertisement. The ad that showed a pregnant Hindu woman pleasantly taken aback by her Muslim mother-in-law who had organised a Hindu-style godh-bharai (baby shower) and had taken the young woman into a warm embrace.

After all, does such a hunky-dory inter-religious marriage exist? That too with an actually mutually affectionate saas-bahu? Looks like Ekta Kapoor has to start her TV serial tutorials all over again.

Jokes apart, for those who have been living under a rock all this week, here is what happened: As soon as the ad described above was out, Twitter erupted with a call to #boycottTanishq. A few thousand tweeters threatened never to buy the brand again; a few dared others to ‘retweet if you agree’. Meanwhile, some of us had to watch and re-watch the advertisement just to find out what the hell was there in it to be so angry about. Until we were asked, why was it not a Muslim woman instead, married into a Hindu household? Why was the brand promoting ‘love jihad’?

Tanishq then said sorry and pulled the ad off the air. It was now the turn of the other set to get angry. Why did a brand have to bend to social media mafia?

Extremism is nothing new. India has been there, seen that. For those in anguish over the slow death of the ‘secular’, a reality check: As a student, I saw pictures of mobs burning Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses; 12 people actually died in a riot in February 1989 in the then-Bombay even as Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini said the book was anti-Islam and issued a fatwa seeking Rushdie’s head. The 90s dealt a further blow to the façade of tolerance. MF Hussain was targeted; venues having his paintings were attacked because they insulted Hindu gods. I heard murmurs around back then, “An attack is bad, but would he paint the gods of his own religion too in the nude?”

Thirty years on, the Fatwa on Rushdie stands, and the price for his head has been hiked; Husain never returned from exile to his country that his heart ached for.

Insult -- perceived or real -- is the hardest of emotions to heal. If anything, insult hardens, adding every incident thereon to strengthen the hate for the ‘other’.

Of course, social media fans flames. The news media then gives that incident – thereby the insult - the oxygen of publicity, so that you and I who had no view on it in the first place, are now forced to take sides. Within no time, there is an Us vs Them war. Labels and taunts are fired at one another: Pseudo secular, Left Liberal, Bhakt, Commie, Chaddi. More insult.

Insult over insult is a saga that never ends. An insult tally is kept, each side waits to hurl back the next one.

In 2017, The Insult, the first Lebanese movie to be nominated for an Oscar after almost being banned, examined the searing wounds of its country, caused by something similar to what India faces -- the animosity between the majority Lebanese community and the minorities, the Palestinians. A spat between Tony, a Lebanese Christian, and Yasser over a leaking water pipe goes on to be a fight, until a bad word hurled at Yasser hits at the heart of the Palestinian struggle and lands up becoming a national controversy, with both sides up in arms. In the gripping courtroom drama that follows, we learn of how the majority community feels equally hurt, its patience tested by the government favouring the minority over decades; and the resentment of having to let go every time builds up into anger that is stoked by politicians and leads to hate that won’t heal in a hurry.

India needs that deep examining for itself. The majority, the minorities, civil society, but the media first on whether it needs to blow incidents out of proportion. Worse, why it blows only some incidents, sweeps away some under the carpet, and shames those who ask why or what about. It’s the one that you thought you swept away that comes back to bite you. Why not be fair to every religion, every community; because when you are treated unfair, you never forget...the insult.

The redeeming part in the Tanishq episode was of couples who swarmed social media with pictures of their interfaith marriages, and of Hindus who lambasted the boycott call. Others served it the rightful royal ignore – like my mother who asked what I was writing about this time. I told her, to which she said without looking up from her cooking, “What controversy? That ad? It was so beautiful, what is there to fight about?”