Recently, Tanishq released an advertisement that aimed to promote love jihad by showing a Hindu girl married into a Muslim family. The ad created an outrage mostly among the Hindu Community, #BoycottTanishq began trending on social media.
People from various sections of the society condemned the advertisement and called it out for ‘promoting Love Jihad‘. Following the uproar, Tanishq took down the advertisement from its social media handles, as well as its official Youtube channel.
Since then, many social media users stood in solidarity with the jewellery brand and shared beautiful stories and pictures of inter-religion weddings. Zara Parwal, a Pune resident, too, came forward to support the inter-religious weddings and posted pictures from her wedding ceremony to a Hindu man.
On October 14, Zara tweeted in favour of the jewellery brand by sharing her wedding pictures, “This is for Tanishq Jewelry and bigots who called for ‘Boycott Tanishq’ and have doubted ‘what if’ religions were changed. So here goes, my introductory name is Zara Farooqui and I have been married to Nikhil Parwal since 2016. And these are our wedding pictures.”
Soon after, Zara received a huge backlash from social media users for posting her wedding pictures. The comment section of the post was bombarded with threats and bullying to Zara and her family. She received over 40,000 messages abusing her. Some of them even tried to contact her family and intimidate them. Some of the trolls crossed the limits by trying to leak her location and phone number.
In a thread of tweets, she wrote, “We had a big fat Indian wedding. Except for some distant relatives, everyone was involved and blessed us. I get it, for some narrow-minded people it is absurd. But our families honour and accept each other’s rites with open arms. I hope that all the bigots will get to experience such unconditional and pure love in their life.”
After a constant bombardment of invectives, Zara has registered a case in the cyber cell, Pune. She has provided IDs of all of the Twitter and Facebook accounts that were jeopardizing and intimidating her and her family.
