SAN FRANCISCO (Diya TV) — India’s foreign minister criticized online retail giant Amazon.com after its Canadian website began selling doormats made from the South Asian nation’s flag.
Sushma Swaraj tweeted that Amazon should issue an “unconditional apology” and withdraw the “insulting” products. She added that India would be revoking the visas of the company’s officials living the country, if the doormats were not taken down.
Amazon said Wednesday it had removed the doormats from its site.
In a series of tweets, Swaraj asked India’s High Commission in Canada to broach the matter with the company, after it was brought to her attention by another Twitter user. The doormats, which were being sold by a third party retailer, were described as, “personalized durable machine-washable indoor/outdoor items.”
Amazon sells doormats featuring the flags of nations from around the world, however, in India, desecration of the flag is punishable with fines and imprisonment. Last June, Amazon found itself in a similar situation after doormats featuring Hindu gods went on sale. In years past, several questionable items, such as toilet seats, shoes and dog tags, have gone on sale adorned with the images of Hindu deities, particularly that of Ganesha, known most commonly in the West for his elephant face.
“It is inappropriate, and it is offensive to devotees,” said Rajan Zed, a Reno, Nev.-based Hindu activist who protests against such commercial products, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
Some Hindu symbols have become particularly valuable to some brands.
For example, Brahma Beer in Brazil, estimated to be the world’s ninth top-selling beer, carries a name that also refers to a Hindu god. Zed said he contacted Anheuser-Busch InBev, now the owner of Brahma, about discontinuing the product, but he acknowledged that it was too significant a revenue source for the company to terminate.
In the U.S., the yoga industry is a multibillion-dollar per year business. One which has for years been churning out yoga mats, towels and exercise pants that place “om” symbols and images of Ganesha close to or directly underneath the feet and legs. The fact that these images are so valuable to companies is a real problem, said Suhag Shukla of the Hindu-American Foundation.
“On the one side, people are very familiar with Hindu concepts like karma or reincarnation” and practices like yoga, she said. But on the other hand, these elements have been stripped of any association with Hinduism.
Shukla’s group is trying to change that. Its members previously launched a “Take Back Yoga” campaign to educate the public about yoga’s connection to Hinduism.
