The online outrage against Lenskart over its discriminatory policy of allowing store employees to wear hijabs while disallowing bindis and kalawas has spilled onto the real world.
Some Lenskart stores in Pune have seen protests from Hindu organizations over the company’s discriminatory policy. “Hindu organisations went to a few @Lenskart_com stores in Pune and convinced the employees to down their shutters till Peyush Bansal clarifies on the grooming policy and admits that the earlier policy was blatantly discriminatory and anti-Hindu,” wrote influencer Shefali Vaidya, who has been at the forefront of the online protests against the company. The pictures showed protestors sharing their demands with store employees.
Another video showed protestors, supposedly in a Lenskart Bengaluru outlet, entering and encouraging the staff there to apply tikas in defiance of the company policy.
Lenskart Discrimination Case
The Lenskart discrimination case had first surfaced when Lenskart dressing guide for its store staff had been leaked on social media. As per the guide, Lenskart allowed employees to wear hijabs, but didn’t allow employees to wear bindis or kalawas (Hindu religious threads). After much outrage, Lenskart CEO Peyush Bansal had written a post on X, initially calling the document “inaccurate”, but said that it didn’t reflect their present guidelines.
After Bansal had been even more vociferously attacked on social media for his response — he didn’t address why the policy existed in the first place, or shared the updated new policy — he had come up with another post. This time, he said that the policy had contained an “incorrect line”. “It contained an incorrect line about bindi/tilak that should never have been written and does not reflect our values or actual practice. When we discovered this on February 17, well before this became a public conversation, we immediately removed it,” he said.
This however was proven to be inaccurate by former Lenskart store manager Akash Falake, who shared emails he’d been sending to Lenskart management about the discriminatory policy since November last year. Falake had first approached HR, and over the next few months approached Lenskart’s legal team, and finally filed a complaint with the Maharashtra government and also written to CM Devendra Fadnavis when Lenskart didn’t change its policy. Falake alleges that he was terminated immediately after he complained to the government.