Was Radio Mirchi's Mat Aao India jingle really anti-India?

The attack on a young Swiss couple in Uttar Pradesh has triggered the campaign by a radio station.   

When advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather created the famous “Hindustan ka dil dekho” jingle to promote Madhya Pradesh tourism, they could not have foreseen that more than a decade later, it would be parodied by #MatAaoIndia, a Radio Mirchi campaign that asks tourists not to visit the country. 

The radio channel ran a video under their short-lived social media campaign #MatAaoIndia, which translates to “don’t visit India” in Hindi. The 48-second jingle that has since been taken down ends with, “India aana aapke sehat ke liye haanikaarak hai. Atithi devo nahin. #MatAaoIndia (Visiting India is injurious to your health. Guests are not gods. Don’t visit India)”. Of course, just because it was taken down by Radio Mirchi does not mean that it no longer exists on the internet.

Newslaundry columnist Anand Ranganathan tweeted the video along with scathing criticism.

Mat Aao India, Don't Come to India, screams @RadioMirchi's DESPICABLE & UNACCEPTABLE campaign in the wake of an awful, terrible crime. SICK. pic.twitter.com/UfeJEC7c6N

— Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) October 26, 2017

Transcript of @radiomirchi's campaign to ward off tourists. NAUSEATING, especially when ALL Indians are deeply troubled by the awful crime. pic.twitter.com/PMEzQdBcZv

— Anand Ranganathan (@ARanganathan72) October 26, 2017

He wasn’t the only one. Swarajya called the video “a slander campaign”. Others on Twitter accused Radio Mirchi of maligning the country’s reputation. And, of course, some decided to label the channel “anti-national”, a word that is more commonplace in the far-Right lexicon than pollution is in Delhi. A lot of this hate was directed not just towards the radio channel but also its vice-president Akash Banerjee, who had tweeted the video with the caption, “With lumpen elements openly; we’ll soon have to update our #IncredibleIndia ads”, but later deleted it.