Mumbai, June 16: The Mahatma has been many things to many people. But when an Australian company portrayed him as a cook to sell beef curry, his great-grandson decided things had gone too far.

Tushar Gandhi today requested Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to take up the matter with the Australian government and stop the New South Wales-based Handi Ghandi Pvt Ltd from abusing the Mahatma’s memory.

Sridhar Dhoopad, an Indian based in Sydney, had called up Tushar Gandhi on Wednesday and told him how his great grandfather’s caricature was being used to entice Indians to buy the company’s takeaways.

Company website www.handighandi.com shows the caricature (in picture), which resembles the Mahatma, holding a takeaway parcel. The caricature is also part of the company’s logo that carries the punchline: Great curries? no worries.

Tushar Gandhi would have had no problems as long as the Mahatma sold the company’s samosas, vegetable curries, parathas, naans, chutneys, salads and biryanis. It was the Beef Madras, beef vindaloo, lamb rogan josh, Bombay Fish and butter chicken that got his goat.

“I have nothing against non-vegetarian food,” the relative said, “but using Bapu’s image to sell meat curry is too much. I probably would not have raised the issue if the company had promoted vegetarianism and health food.”

He added that the company uses the Gandhi caricature in its trademark, registered with the Australian trademark body.

Tushar Gandhi has also objected to a jingle put on the Handi Ghandi website which, he claims, imitates actor Ben Kingsley’s style of speaking, though it does not mention the Mahatma. Kingsley portrayed the Mahatma in Richard Attenborough’s Oscar-winning 1980 classic, Gandhi.

The great-grandson has written to the Prime Minister’s Office, the ministry of external affairs and the Union law and judiciary department to take the issue up at a diplomatic level with Canberra.

“Bapu’s image is protected by the Indian Constitution,” he said. “It is the equivalent of a national flag or any other Indian emblem (in sanctity).”

According to him, Handi Ghandi’s business has largely been restricted to small towns in the Australian outback, but is now rapidly moving to the cities.

“Dhoopad said it (the company) was not so well-known earlier, but now it has been moving to cities like Sydney. Indians have found beers named after Ganesha offensive, and our gods and goddesses on western clothing as offensive. I would like to fight for Bapu,” Tushar Gandhi said.

The great-grandson himself had faced public criticism in 2001 when he was accused of trying to sell the Mahatma’s image to a US-based licensing company for use in a film advertisement for a credit card. CMG Worldwide had offered $51,000 per year for the use of the image.

“I was completely misunderstood. I wasn’t trying to sell Bapu’s patents. My only intention was that I should have a say in who gets to use Bapu’s image to ensure that his name is not abused for commercial gains,” Tushar Gandhi said.

Last year, Indians were outraged when a soft-porn magazine carried a photo-feature depicting an American stud doing a fitness workout.

“The exercises used a dummy who is punched and beaten up. The dummy resembled Bapu. There was a public furore. The government has to do something against such blatantly unacceptable behaviour,” Tushar Gandhi said.