Businesses want to make money and it seems that Amazon Canada (www.amazon.ca) was trying to capitalize on the patriotism of Indian Canadians by selling Indian flag doormats. That was before they met the wrath of India’s external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj.
Sushma Swaraj, the twitter warrior, was informed yesterday by Atul Bhobe, a fellow tweeter, asking her to take note and to censure Amazon Canada. He sent her an uploaded screenshot of the site with the Indian tricolor flag doormats.
@SushmaSwaraj Madam. Amazon Canada must be censured and warned not to sell India flag doormats. Please take action. pic.twitter.com/td4KXlDUQL
— Atul Bhobe (@atulbhobe) January 11, 2017
She responded immediately within a couple of hours and tweeted to the Indian high commission to take up the matter with Amazon Canada and to get the door mats removed from their sites.
Indian High Commission in Canada : This is unacceptable. Please take this up with Amazon at the highest level. https://t.co/L4yI3gLk3h
— Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) January 11, 2017
She then went on with a series of tweets first asking them to apologize immediately and then threatening to revoke their visas to India.
Read more: India: Government running through tweets?
Amazon must tender unconditional apology. They must withdraw all products insulting our national flag immediately.
— Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) January 11, 2017
If this is not done forthwith, we will not grant Indian Visa to any Amazon official. We will also rescind the Visas issued earlier.
— Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) January 11, 2017
Indians also hit Amazon help in thousands asking it to remove the products, threatening Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos with loss of business and using the Canadian flag as a sanitary pad.
Please stop this bullshit @AmazonHelp @amazonca before we start using canada flag as sanitary pad or pampers @JustinTrudeau https://t.co/mN5xjElv2a
— Ali MG (@aliasgarmg) January 11, 2017
Amazonhelp Canada was forced to respond to people and stated
“These products were never sold on Amazon.in. We have escalated this to our concerned teams and are working on the issue,”
They have also removed those products now. It can still be seen that they have several other country flags that are used as doormats including the USA, UK, Jamaica and so on. Since this is a business/marketing decision for a company – they will produce goods if they think enough people would buy that product.
In this case it has hit them in the face, but Amazon must have analyzed that Indians like buying products which have their flag on them. It is interesting to note however, they do not sell door mats that had the Pakistani flag. Should we take this to mean that Pakistani’s don’t like buying products with their flag?