The Lenskart protests — which haven’t shown signs of slowing down even after the company had released its updated style guidelines which allowed bindis and tilaks — seem to have hit its stock price as markets have opened on Monday.
Lenskart’s stock is down 4.76% in trade today. The stock had opened marginally down at Rs. 530 per share, but fell through the day, touching Rs. 509 as of 12 pm. This represented a 4.76% fall. In contrast, the broader Nifty index is up 0.4% on the day.
The fall is even more pronounced over the last 5 days. Since April 15th, when the controversy had first broken out, Lenskart’s shares are down 7.5%. Lenskart currently has a market cap of around Rs. 88,000 crore, which means that it has lost nearly Rs. 7,000 crore in market cap since the controversy.
The Lenskart Religious Discrminiation Controversy
The Lenskart religious discrimination controversy had exploded on 15th April when its style guidelines for store staff 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 The same day, CEO Peyush Bansal had posted on X, calling the document “inaccurate”, and indicating that it was “outdated”.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.
On 18th April — after three days of social media and on-ground protests — Lenskart shared its updated dressing guidelines, which now allowed staff to wear bindis and tikas. But a few hours later, the claim of a Gujarati Lenskart trainee hit social media, who said that he’d been told to cut off his shikha (traditional Hindu tuft of hair) and remove his kalawa if he wanted to work at Lenskart. After he refused to comply, he was fired.
This seemed to lead to even more protests, with a large crowd parading CEO Peyush Bansal’s effigy in Gujarat Lenskart calling him a “Hindu virodhi (Hindu opposer)”. They then set fire to the effigy outside Lenskart’s store. In Dehradun, people went to Lenskart stores and — with their permission — applied tilaks to Lenskart’s staff and customers. Similar videos came in from several locations across India.
The protests and the boycott calls now seem to be reflecting in Lenskart’s stock price, with the company’s market cap having fallen by Rs. 7,000 crore in the last 5 days. It remains to be seen if this fall will sustain, but Lenskart investors are clearly spooked with all the negative sentiment around the firm over the last week.