What’s It About Corporate Jihad?

 CORPORATE JIHAD’ IS A COMBUSTIBLE PHRASE. Should we use it at all? Or should we tone down the whole Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Nashik BPO scandal merely to a “relationship gone wrong”, as one of our left-liberal TV anchors put it?

As a proponent of intermedial hermeneutics, my approach should, by now, be predictable to those who know my earlier work. The truth, as is usually the case, lies somewhere between two reductive and simplistic extremes.

But let me first respond to the anchor’s quip: of course, it is a relationship gone wrong. But not between two individuals, sordid and unsavoury as that alleged affair between a married Muslim man allegedly seducing, under false pretences, a Dalit junior employee from a small town might be.

No, this is a much bigger issue. Of a relationship gone wrong between corporate India and its Hindu clients, customers, workers, and stakeholders. And the time has come to rectify this relationship if we are serious about healing it.

Used irresponsibly, Corporate Jihad becomes a slogan, even a dog whistle, target­ing Muslims. It draws suspicion onto a huge section of our population, over 220 million of them. It also serves a political purpose: to consolidate Hindu votes by creating an internal enemy.

Corporate Jihad, when used as a blanket condemnation, is thus unjust and should be rejected. But when examined judiciously and deployed analytically, it points to a possible capture of corporate and workspace culture by networks of malign intent and, often, inter­nationally funded entities that deliberately weaponise ideological, religious, or sexual practices in coercive and subversive ways against targeted individuals and communities.

That’s as balanced and responsible a definition, albeit a mouthful, that I can come up with right now. If you have a better one, do share it.

Corporate Jihad, in other words, is a fact even if not a widespread trend in corporate India. It has gone unnoticed, often under the law-enforcement radar, partly because of institutional reluctance to recognise majority-community victimhood and partly because big corporations pay tonnes of money to lawyers and PR specialists to protect their brand value and reputation.

But the April 2026 TCS outrage has blown the lid. Now, the cockroaches are crawling out, so to speak, of corporate India’s woodwork. And TCS is not only the largest and most profitable of the Tata Group companies, but with a market cap of `8.86 lakh crore, one of the biggest in India.

Yes, the proverbial stuff has hit the fan. Or to mix metaphors, the jihad genie is out of India’s corporate bottle.

In TCS’ Nashik BPO centre, multiple Hindu women employees have filed FIRs alleging systematic sexual harassment, emotional blackmail, financial manipula­tion, religious ridicule, and coercive pressure to convert to Islam. Team leaders, identified in police records and court proceedings as Danish Sheikh, Tausif Attar, Raza Memon, Shahrukh Qureshi, Shafi Sheikh, Asif Ansari, and an HR executive, Nida Khan, stand accused. The last on this list is still absconding.

Victims have detailed how they were mocked for their Hindu practices. A Shiva linga, for instance, was derided as an obscene symbol of male genitalia. Krishna was labelled a womaniser and Draupadi an adulteress. Some victims claimed that they were pressured to convert with videos on namaaz, wuzu, roza, hijab, and kalma, and threatened with Jahannum (hell) if they did not accept Islam. Some even alleged physi­cal coercion, improper touch, and sexual harassment.

A couple of the victims reported behavioural shifts: how they were induced or forced into shedding bindis, foregoing lipstick, or stopping temple visits. Others said that their bank accounts were controlled by the accused, with one `18 lakh transaction flagged.

Inducements included actual jobs with TCS and promises to send victims abroad to Malaysia with enhanced opportunities and emoluments. Some of these methods of threat and inducement have flagged trafficking concerns and international networks of funding.

Consequently, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) was instituted, arrests followed, TCS suspended the employees, and Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis himself described the matter as “very serious”. On April 12, 2026, Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Bandi Sanjay Kumar used the phrase “Corporate Jihad” on X to describe the controversy.

The Organiser, the RSS-affiliated weekly, published detailed reports drawing directly from the first FIR (No 156/2026 at Deolali Police Station, filed March 26, 2026). It framed the case not as an isolated misconduct but as part of a pattern, an extension, arguably, of Love Jihad, Land Jihad, Halal Jihad, and other ideological campaigns, complete with foreign funding and organised networks.

 Court records show that Nida Khan, the fugitive HR of­ficial, was denied interim anticipatory bail on April 20, 2026. She is still at large. The questions remain: Who is shielding and protecting her and why? The FIR also cites TCS Chairman N Chandrasekaran calling the matter “gravely concerning”.

Quite expectedly, counter-narratives in some media outlets have dismissed the entire fracas as a “manufactured” Hindutva ploy—an “affair gone sour” amplified into communal panic. Yet, the existence of nine FIRs, arrests, an SIT, and victim testimonies under oath indicates substance beyond media spin.

WOKE INFILTRATION

In my view, this is not merely a one-off workplace scandal. It crystallises a deeper rupture: the betrayal of trust between corpo­rate India and the Hindu majority that forms its core workforce, customer base, and cultural bedrock.

Globalised and incentivised, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) and Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) metrics, which many big corporations have officially adopted, have wreaked havoc in increasingly obvious ways. That some of these metrics are linked to funding and investments, especially from abroad, makes them all the more coercive and damaging.

The TCS case, therefore, did not emerge in a vacuum.

Consider Lenskart’s April 2026 internal ‘Staff Uniform and Grooming Guide’. The document explicitly barred “religious tikka/tilak and Bindi/Sticker”, mandated removal of “religious threads/wristbands” (kalawa), and restricted sindoor to “mini­mal” application that must not touch the forehead.

Yet, it permitted black hijabs (“medium chest coverage” so as not to obscure the logo) and black turbans. Burkhas were banned, but the asymmetry was still glaring. Hindu markers of faith were excised; Islamic ones accommodated. The timing, amid the TCS uproar, ignited a huge backlash led by influencers like Shefali Vaidya.

CEO Peyush Bansal called the docu­ment “outdated” and “incorrect”, issuing a revised guide welcoming bindis, tilaks, sindoor, kalawa, mangalsutras, hijabs, and turbans alike. The apology rang hollow; the original policy had circulated inter­nally, reflecting a corporate calculus that prioritised certain sensitivities.

Speaking of the Tata Group, Tanishq, another Tata brand, has been flagged repeatedly for “anti-Hindu” campaigns. Its 2020, the ‘Ekatvam’ (Unity) advertisement depicted a Muslim family organising a traditional Hindu baby shower for their Hindu daughter-in-law.

Harmless interfaith harmony rendered as Muslim benevolence towards a Hindu bride? No. Because there is a total absence of reciprocal imagery with Hindu families celebrating a Muslim daughter-in-law. Islam, we must not forget, prohibits Muslims from marrying non-Muslims. That the Hindu bride must, per force, have converted—and not vice-versa—was never even hinted at.

There are many similar ads. For instance, when the Hindu fes­tival of light, Deepavali, was stripped of its cultural background and turned into the Persianised ‘Jashn-e-Riwaaz’. The culprit in this case was Fabindia in its pre-Diwali2021 campaign.

I had myself observed and commented on these trends, but was not able to understand what was behind such one-way cultural erasure. Corporate endorsement of demographic and cultural erosion under the guise of inclusivity was evident, even obvious. But what could be the reasons behind it?

I found some answers in Vijaya Viswanathan’s recent inter­view with Sree Iyer on PGurus [shorturl.at/mPGtG]. Viswanathan, a trustee of Rajiv Malhotra’s Infinity Foundation, is also the co-author of Snakes in the Ganga. Viswanathan dissects how global ESG frameworks function as a “corporate social credit system”. They not only import and incorporate Western woke ideologies such as DEI, critical race theory (CRT), and faith in the workplace, but also bring them into the Indian boardroom.

These policies incentivise asymmetric religious accommodation: Hindus must bend backwards to make Muslims comfortable. How? By expunging their own identity markers like bindis, mangalsutras, kalavas, shikhas, and janeus, all of which are banned outright by Air India, IndiGo, Vodafone Idea, and several other Indian corporations.

At the same time, prayer rooms, hijabs, and proselytisation by Abrahamic faiths are not only allowed but apparently encour­aged to meet the ‘S’ (Social) pillar of ESG scoring.

Corporations thus become frontiers of conversion, even conversation laboratories.

Religious freedom is big business, as is Halal certification. Worse, scoring on these indices becomes, at times, a prereq­uisite for ‘angel’ investors and venture capital funding, some of which is sourced from the Middle East and other Muslim geographies. Thus, vicious cycles get reinforced instead of virtuous ones.

Indian tech giants—TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Tech Mahindra, and others— publicly champion DEI/ESG frame­works. TCS targets 36 per cent women in its workforce, runs ERGs for LGBTQ+ em­ployees, and pursues “underrepresented groups” hiring. Infosys and Wipro mirror this with unconscious-bias training, PwD recruitment, and pride initiatives.

These are marketed as modern, global best practices. Yet in India’s context, where Hindus constitute roughly 80 per cent of the population, ‘diversity’ initiatives are not only redundant but often translate into disproportionate appeasement of religious minorities, especially Muslims.

Domestic backlash is branded as ‘Hindutva’ majoritarianism and religious intolerance. Agencies such the United States Com­mission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), often helmed or supported by Muslims with Pakistani links, or by pow­erful Christian fundamentalist and evangelical lobbies, paint India and Hindus in a bad light. No surprise that the recurrent tropes used by ‘Hindu-haters’ and ‘Hindu-baiters’ hark back to the worst of heathen-bashing practices and polemics of colonial times, complete with threats of hellfire and eternal damnation.

OPEN SOCIETIES

But here is the kicker. DEI/ESG-style initiatives flourish, it would appear, exclusively in open, pluralistic societies. Authoritarian states such as China, Russia, or the Muslim world in general, regardless of the style of government, do not, as a rule, import or implement them.

Even when it comes to climate crusaders, you hardly find them in China, the world’s largest carbon emitter. There is zero tolerance for grassroots climate activism, let alone for celebrities such as Greta Thunberg. Environmental protests are non-existent, coal plants proliferate under state direction, and ‘green’ rhetoric serves the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) control rather than genuine emission reduction.

Similarly, gender transition or pride movements are practically non-existent in corporate China or, for that matter, anywhere in the Muslim world. Such states effectively ban male idols in media and treat LGBT advocacy as foreign subversion. In China, Uyghur faces, or hijabs, are not celebrated in Han-dominated firms; instead, Xinji­ang’s Muslim minorities face re-education camps, forced labour, and cultural erasure. Corporate China does not platform Muslim identity; it assimilates or eradicates it.

Flip the Indian scenario. Imagine a Chinese state-owned enterprise in Beijing issuing guidelines celebrating hijabs while banning Han cultural symbols. Or a Pakistani firm in Karachi prominently featuring Hindu bindis, kalavas, and temple imagery in its branding, with HR policies shielding Hindu employees from Islamist pressure.

Or Bangladeshi corporates running ‘diversity’ drives that prioritise Hindu festivals amid documented minority persecu­tion. Such policies would be inconceivable; they would invite state retaliation. Saudi Aramco does not host pride parades or fund gender clinics. Russia’s corporate sector does not agonise over ‘systemic’ Orthodox Christian privilege. Authoritarian regimes enforce ideological conformity or majoritarian norms. They do not subsidise their own subversion. Open societies tolerate immense diversity by design. Free speech, rule of law, minority protections. This very openness becomes the vector for exploitation. Woke/DEI/ESG ideologies, born in Western academia and exported via multinationals, weaponise guilt, equity metrics, and ‘inclusion’ against the host culture.

In India, Hindu tolerance, evident in constitutional secular­ism, temple funding disparities, and historical pluralism, is re­framed as an obligation to accommodate practices that, in origin, are anti-Hindu and Hindu-hating.

Corporations, chasing ESG scores, global capital, and Western acclaim, internalise this asymmetry, which is no accident but deliberate social engineering. The results are there for all to see: the banning of Hindu symbols (Lenskart) while normalising others, such as hijab or Muslim workplace prayers. Or ads that romanticise one-directional interfaith unions (Tanishq). Or ‘diversity hires’ in supervisory roles that allegedly enable coercion (TCS Nashik).

TIME TO WAKE UP

The ongoing TCS investigation, with multiple victims and increased evidence gathering, exposes how Corporate Jihad oper­ates. Not through bombs or open indoctrination, but through institutional capture and subtle pressure.

It is jihad by other means, demographic, cultural, psychological, leveraging the very openness of open societies and democratic polities. Hindu employees, the backbone of India’s IT miracle, discover that global­ist corporations prioritise minority optics over their cultural and religious dignity or identity. The victim-victor hierarchy is inverted; the so-called majority ends up being targeted and oppressed. The so-called minority exploits the situation to its advantage.

This is not unique to India. Across the West, DEI initiatives have produced similar backlashes. Corporate retreats, notably Target, Walmart, and McDonald’s, scaling back post-2025 US policy shifts, are only the tip of the iceberg. There are also multiple lawsuits and cultural fatigue. Thanks to POTUS Donald J Trump, DEI is being dismantled and rolled back all over the US.

In India, the stakes are civilisational. Hindus have historically absorbed invaders through assimilation, but modern corporate India risks reverse assimilation by institutionalising minority exceptionalism under ‘inclusion’. Ironically, we may have to learn how to push back from the US.

Generally speaking, open societies must recalibrate. DEI/ESI must be reframed: merit-first, culture-neutral, reciprocal. India, as I have long been arguing, must rethink even reservations, truly the elephant in the room. When, if ever, that will happen, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, corporate India would do well to be more Hindu-friendly, both in its posturing and practices. Certainly, multiple steps must be taken and safeguards put in place to check the spread of Cor­porate Jihad. Or, if you don’t like the term, “the broken relationship” between companies and their majority workers and stakeholders.