Late last year, when outrage at the brutal gangrape of an innocent girl in Delhi was at its peak, agitated Indians wanted to debate and discuss wider issues concerned with the representation of women in popular culture. The Punjabi rap singer, Honey Singh, whose songs have obscene lyrics about women, was the first to feel the heat.

Such was the mood that the organisers cancelled his New Year’s concert. A month or so after that, a friend who happened to attend a wedding in Delhi mentioned that the DJ was merrily playing Honey Singh songs to a happy dancing crowd. It was business as usual.
Now consider the cheap and disgusting ad series created by the well-known agency JWT for its top client, Ford. The three ads show scantily clad girls, bound and gagged in a Ford Figo, apparently to show how spacious the boot is. Ford and its agency scrambled to explain that the ads were not officially approved by the company. The ads were not published in any newspaper or magazine but were purportedly created for the express purpose of entering for advertising awards.
This is not the place to discuss how the Indian ad industry operates. The bigger question is: after all that outrage at the gangrape and all those debates, is it business as usual?
Connecting the heinous rape to an ad may appear to be far-fetched, but there is a mindset that connects Honey Singh to crude item numbers and yes, to this kind of ads. It is the mindset that prevails across class barriers, educational levels and social divisions — that women are fair game and there is no problem in representing them in the cheapest and sleaziest possible way. This mentality is deeply entrenched in Indian society — it is manifested in one way in the macho culture to which Honey Singh belongs and another in the fratboy attitudes that prevail in advertising. The slick dudes in our top agencies may balk at being compared to some hick rapper, but scratch the surface and both have the same DNA — show the chick as a sex object for easy gratification and better sales. Their target audience, too, harbours similar ideas and wants to see women undressed and humiliated.
The JWT/Ford fiasco is hardly the first — or, I dare say, the last — such episode. The advertising industry has not been known for harbouring sensitivity about such issues. This particular ad may have been an extreme case, but as far as Indian advertising is concerned, women are still in the kitchen, rustling up quick snack foods for their hungry, football-playing genius sons if not showing their daughters to prospective grooms. The agencies can claim, and they may be justified, that their job is to sell products, not worry about social issues. And, after all, newspapers do print those ads and television channels happily beam commercials. So why pick on advertising? Also, this industry has a self-regulating system, something that ad professionals never fail to point out.
This refers to the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), a body that is run by the industry to ensure that some basic codes are followed and complaints are addressed. The website of the ASCI (www.ascionline.org) has no mention of the Ford controversy, which could be because no member of the public has made any complaint. It also has a “fast-track” system wherein complaints made by rival corporates are speedily disposed of. The ASCI website (which gives details up to September 12) has a list of newspaper articles about the industry and itself, but there is nothing on the hottest ongoing controversy. One can almost imagine the defence, the kind that the government and the bureaucracy are masters at offering — “this was not brought to our notice” — in which case, what value does such self-regulation have? And, will anyone want to take on their peers in the business, whatever they may be muttering under their breath privately? Which is why there has been a studied silence about the entire Ford Figo affair within the otherwise vocal ad industry. (Not that the mainstream media has spent much time on it either.)
The key issue here is not about JWT. (For the record, JWT sacked those it felt were responsible for this fiasco.) It is about how entrenched our attitudes towards women are. Sitting in our comfortable urban drawing rooms we may sneer at the khap panchayats, but it would be misleading to think that we are progressive while they live in the Stone Age. We may find bizarre the assertion that rapes happen in India (Westernised and, therefore, foreign) and not in Bharat (imbued with desi, therefore, pure culture), but ads such as these from some fine creative minds only serve to reinforce that perception.
We are not going to change overnight and one won’t be surprised that even now someone out there is wondering what the fuss is all about. The ads received some support too; let’s have a sense of humour about this guys, was the kind of comment much seen on social media in recent days. Those sacked may even be wondering what they did wrong, when there has never been any outrage over other sexist (and, even racist) ads by their professional peers. Certainly this is the first time something like this has happened in recent memory, that too without a specific complaint. Indeed, JWT and its client have shown that they do take note of public opinion and even if this was damage control, the tough decision will send out a message to others in the business. Now the next task should be to codify standards involving not just false claims but also attitudes such as sexism and vulgarity. Maybe mindsets won’t change overnight, but advertisers will think twice before putting their witty ideas on paper.