India’s food delivery platform Zomato served a witty response to a customer who wanted to cancel his order because the allocated delivery driver was a "Muslim fellow." And the internet is loving it.
Amit Shukla, a resident of Jabalpur, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh refused to take his food delivery from Zomato as the man who was delivering his food that day was not of Hindu faith.
Mr Shukla took to Twitter, accusing the company of forcing its customers to take deliveries from “people we don’t want.”
He boasted that he didn’t even demand a refund for cancelling the order and threatened the service with legal action.
A snapshot of Amit Shukla's tweet to Zomato. Source: Twitter
The company’s founder Deepinder Goyal, also weighed in and backed his company’s position, saying Zomato wasn’t sorry to lose business that conflicted with its values.
Within minutes, the rebuttal by Zomato garnered thousands of retweets as social media users lapped up the response to what some called the customer’s ‘bigotry’.
Omar Abdullah, the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, also joined in to applaud the foods ervice for calling out the customer.
Religion and food:
Responding to the incident, Kriti Saxena, a Mumbai-based food blogger told SBS Punjabi that “communalism has no place in the food industry”.
“Religious influence on Indian food has been profound and has in fact resulted in the formation of a diverse variety of food and cooking techniques in the country and we must not undermine that connection.
“But to insinuate that Hindus wouldn’t eat food cooked by Muslim chefs and vice versa is deplorable. It could be detrimental to the industry and thus, I’m grateful to Zomato for standing up to such bigotry and communal ideas.”
“The food industry is all about pleasant flavours. It has no place for people who intend to spread hatred and communalism,” said Ms Saxena.
