New Delhi: Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari received flak online for promoting a ‘problematic’ advertisement on road safety featuring Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar.
The Union Minister on Friday shared the video on his Twitter handle in a bid to aid the government’s efforts to promote six airbags in cars. The advertisement received backlash on the internet for allegedly promoting dowry culture.
In the said advertisement, a father was seen crying while bidding farewell to his daughter after marriage. Akshay Kumar, portraying a policeman, can be seen standing beside the grieving father taunting him for sending the bride and groom in a car with only two airbags instead of six. “Make life safer by travelling in a vehicle with 6 airbags (roughly translated),” Gadkari wrote in the tweet.
Shiv Sena Rajya Sabha MP Priyanka Chaturvedi quoted Gadkari’s tweet and slammed the advertisement asking whether the government is spending money to promote car safety or dowry. “This is such a problematic advertisement. Who passes such creatives? Is the government spending money to promote the safety aspect of a car or promoting the evil& criminal act of dowry through this ad?” her tweet read.
The ad was launched after Cyrus Mistry, the former chairman of Indian conglomerate Tata Sons, passed away in a car crash.
The ad comes a month after the release of Kumar’s film “Raksha Bandhan”, which focused on dowry culture, something the actor likened to “extortion” during its promotions.
How the mighty have fallen, asked a Twitter user. “WHAT an inglorious fall for this worm. Reduced to crawling like this. In an ad so stupid that it should never have crawled out of the WhatsApp sewer that it belonged to,” he wrote on Twitter and described himself as a former Akshay Kumar fan.
