Lenskart had shared its updated dressing guidelines yesterday which allowed Hindus to wear bindis and kalawas at their stores, but videos of protests at Lenskart locations are still streaming in on social media.
Lenskart CEO Peyush Bansal’s effigy was burnt outside a Lenskart store in Gujarat. A large group of protestors paraded a poster of Bansal calling him “Hindu Virodhi (Opposer of Hindus)” across Surat. They then hit the poster, before setting fire to it outside a Lenskart outlet.
Protestors also encouraged Lenskart staff to put on tilaks and put tikas on the photos of Lenskart models at the stores. A sign saying “Hindu” was also put up outside Lenskart’s store.
Several other videos also showed people entering Lenskart stores, and encouraging employees to put on tikas. Some protestors also brought their Lenskart glasses to the stores and destroyed them in front of the store staff, and urged others to boycott Lenskart.
A group went to all Lenskart stores in Dehradun, and — after taking their permission — applied tilaks to Lenskart employees. They also put tilaks on Lenskart customers. “If we lose our culture, we’ll lose our nation. I’m so happy to see young people take this initiative,” a Lenskart customer said told the protestors.
Others filmed themselves outside Lenskart stores and asked people to boycott the company.
And someone even stood at a busy intersection with a sign saying “Boycott Lenskart”.
The Lenskart Religious Discrminiation Controversy
The Lenskart religious discrimination controversy had exploded on 15th April when Lenskart’s style guidelines were leaked on social media. As per the guidelines, employees were permitted to wear hijabs, but forbidden from showing symbols of Hindu identity including bindis, tikas or kalawas.
The guidelines had caused a furore on X, with thousands of users calling out Lenskart for religious discrimination. The same day, CEO Peyush Bansal had shared an update on X, calling the document “inaccurate”, and indicating that it was “outdated”. He also added that the policy wasn’t actively enforced.
But this didn’t fly with social media users. The very next day, a former Lenskart employee named Akash Falake leaked a set of emails to OfficeChai in which he’d been asking the company to revise its discriminatory policy since November last year, but his requests had been ignored by management. Falake had escalated the matter to Lenskart’s legal team, and had then loged a complaint with the Maharashtra government. He alleges that as soon he had lodged the official complaint, he was fired.
Protests escalate
Lenskart did not react to this report — which essentially showed that CEO Peyush Bansal had attempted to mislead people with his previous claim about the policy not being enforced — and outrage against the company grew. Some people went to Lenskart’s stores and requested staff to shut them down to protest the policy. Others destroyed their Lenskart glasses and went to its stores to throw them in their dustbins. Some even went to Lenskart stores and asked the staff to wear tilaks in defiance of the policy, to which the staff complied.
The crisis – literally — hit close to home for Lenskart CEO Peyush Bansal. Some X users discovered his wife Nidhi Mittal Bansal’s X account, and found tweets which they thought were offensive to Hindus, including remarks on Lord Ram and derogatory remarks on the Hindu Mahasabha.
Within a few hours, Nidhi Mittal deactivated her account, but that didn’t help — the screenshots of her tweets continued going viral. Some users even dug up her blogposts from 2010 in which she’d encouraged Indians to marry Pakistanis, and that generated outrage as well.
It appears that this sustained pressure caused Lenskart to eventually buckle, and share its updated dressing policy.
Anger remains
In spite of the update, social media users seemed outraged about how CEO Peyush Bansal had looked to obfuscate the issue when it had first emerged on social media. Bansal had initially called the policy outdated, but it turned out that it had been in place until even a week ago, when employees were penalized for wearing tikas in stores. He’d also hinted that the policy wasn’t actively enforced, which was shown to be false by the testimony of a Lenskart trainee who said that he’d been asked to cut off his shikha and remove his tilak, and fired when he refused. And Bansal had said that the company had first heard about the issue on 17th February, which was shown to be false by a series of leaked emails which showed that an employee had been asking the management to remove the discriminatory policy since November last year, but was fired for raising his voice. And with social media still full of boycott calls against Lenskart, it appears that this issue is unlikely to die out anytime soon.