Major e-commerce platform Meesho has faced severe backlash from the internet for having stocked and promoted T-shirts sporting Lawrence Bishnoi’s face on them.
Controversy sells. And while that may be a coattail that capitalism wants to ride on endlessly, there are certain instances where the line needs to be drawn. And the internet has made sure of that this time around.
Popular e-commerce website Meesho has been in the news once basic T-shirts with Lawrence Bishnoi’s face as the primary iconography on them were discovered being stocked on their website.
If it is not self-evidently clear what the more urgent problem would appear to be, Bishnoi is a notorious gangster currently imprisoned in Gujarat’s Sabarmati jail on charges of cross-border drug smuggling-thought the list of his criminal charges also includes extortion all the way up to murder-not to mention he is also a key decision maker and the genuine face of the Bishnoi gang.
To morbidly refresh your memory, these are the very players who orchestrated the gunning of late singer Sidhu Moose Wala. More to the point is the spate of death threats that actor Salman Khan has been regularly receiving over the alleged blackbuck killings of 1999.
This runs the gamut from the unprovoked firing outside the actor’s Bandra residence in April to the multiple death threats which have put his security on high alert as he awaits the import of his bulletproof car as an extra measure-accelerated by the murder of NCP leader Baba Siddique-and how the Salman-Bishnoi saga still has the Mumbai police on tenterhooks.
This brings us back to the present case in point, and the question that therefore very obviously arises is why, and how, was it even considered, let alone authorized, to have t-shirts with an imprisoned gangster face on them?
Filmmaker Alishan Jafri was among the first to express the distasteful move by the platform, calling it another shining example of “online radicalisation” rearing its ugly head on India’s impressionable minds. The X thread further called Meesho out for housing similarly templated shirts with the face of deceased criminal Durlabh Kashyap on them.
That the words ‘gangster’ and ‘real hero’ stands splashed across the pieces further drives the point home, as far as severely careless messaging is considered. For a start, the internet has made its displeasure about the situation known.
