New Delhi, June 7: Hari the “Hitler” had to grin and bear it, but the merchant community has had its way.
The community has forced the income tax department to drop an advertisement which it said “depicted” the business biradari as tax-dodgers.
The television ad featured a tax-dodger called Guptaji, which riled the community because the surname Gupta is common among the merchant community in north India.
While name-based commercials have run into trouble before — like the Hari Sadu ad where a man spells out his boss’s name over telephone as ‘H’ for Hitler, ‘A’ for arrogant, ‘R’ for rascal and ‘I’ for idiot — it’s rare for an entire community to close ranks against an advertisement.
For the merchant community, however, it was a matter of pride. “We estimate that some 60 per cent of India’s personal income tax collections come from us,” said Surender Gupta, national president of the Akhil Bharatiya Aggarwal Sammelan, which claims to be an umbrella body for the community in north India.
Indians paid a little over Rs 1.49 lakh crore in personal income tax last year and, if Gupta is correct, his biradari accounted for nearly Rs 90,000 crore.
Gupta, whose Sammelan has some 25,000 members, said he wrote to finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and asked “the two ministers from our community — Pawan Bansal and Sriprakash Jaiswal — to take up this issue” after receiving thousands of letters and emails complaining about the unfair profiling of the community.
Tax officials said they saw the community’s point of view but claimed the profiling wasn’t intentional. “We have taken the ad off air… the character was called Guptaji because Gupta is a common Indian name, there was no intention at racial profiling,” said an official.
Gupta said the community understood it was a “genuine mistake” on the part of the tax department. “We are grateful to Pranabji and Manmohanji for helping clear our names … when we pay so much tax, how can we be depicted as tax-dodgers? I have requested that first names be used in future ads, not surnames which denote a particular community.”
The members of the Vaish mercantile community in north India have a variety of surnames, including Modi, Aggarwal, Goyal, Bansal and Singhal, but the surname Gupta is by far the most popular. Although the Bengali caste Baidya — descendants of practitioners of Ayurveda — also uses the surname Gupta, the ad seemed to suggest a north Indian Gupta.
Kushal Deba, a sociologist from IIT Bombay, explained the reaction. “What used to be allowed to pass as mere humour is now increasingly being challenged as identity issues are becoming important for urban Indians. People are asserting their community pride.”
Job portal naukri.com, however, continued with its Hari Sadu commercial despite a legal challenge by an individual who said the ad had made life miserable for his son who had a similar name. The portal said “the character was fictional” and not intended to reflect a real-life person.
