India and South Korea have both overreacted in the Hyundai ad fuss

MNCs have a code of conduct on ads and public engagement in a host country. They are extremely careful not to get into

An advertisement by a Pakistani dealer of the Hyundai motor company of Korea has caused a lot of fuss. It has led to India’s own version of China’s ‘Wolf diplomacy’ which in Hindi is summed up by the proverb ‘Eent ka jawab pathar se denge’ (we will respond to bricks with stones). 

The facts are these. A Pakistani dealer, taking a leaf out of dealers of some other foreign products in Pakistan, put out an advertisement expressing solidarity with the people of Kashmir and their fight for freedom from India.

This got social media activists in India all riled up and there was a storm of outrage. The Indian Hyundai was taken by surprise and quickly expressed regret. It sells far too many cars here to let this reduce those sales. It is the second largest seller after Maruti-Suzuki, selling around 5 lakh vehicles.

The Indian minister for foreign affairs, responding to the trolls, summoned the Korean ambassador and conveyed his view to him that the ad was ‘unacceptable’. Later, the Korean foreign minister called his Indian counterpart and expressed his regrets. 

Regret, by the way, is not the same as an apology in Korean culture. A regret is like saying” I feel bad that you were offended but really it's not my fault.”

An apology on the other hand implies the acceptance of wrongdoing. It also has strong cultural connotations and means ‘loss of face’ which is a very big thing. 

So they don’t apologise easily. The loss of reputation is too great.

Be that as it may, did the Indian foreign minister overreact? Should he have responded with such alacrity to trolls on social media? Should the matter have been raised to a government level?

After all, it got just one or two mentions in the Korean media and they were more concerned with the impact on Hyundai sales in India. I know this because my wife is a professor of Korean language and studies in JNU and she checked. 

MNCs, it must be mentioned, do have a code of conduct where advertisements and public engagement in a host country are concerned. They are extremely careful not to get into political issues. They stick to their knitting.

But how can they be responsible for what a dealer does? That too in a third country? Especially in a country like Pakistan?

This kind of thing is not even anything remotely like the accepted tenet torts law rule that holds a master responsible for the acts done by a servant while discharging an official duty. 

But is a dealer servant? Is the company for which he deals his master? And what happens if the dealer is in a third country?

The short point is that it was a trivial thing that the Indian government should have ignored. After all, by any reckoning, it was a silly advertisement by an inconsequential dealer. Is it  going to make even an iota of difference to anything?

Likewise, the Korean government also should not have taken it so seriously. This was not an inter-governmental matter. Just a private word to the Indian ambassador in Seoul would have  sufficed. 

Equally, the Indian Hyundai should have distanced itself publicly from the Pakistani dealer’s advertisement. It was not very clever to acknowledge it all. It needed to have been a little bolder. Sales may have dipped for a bit like they did for some cola brands but recovered soon enough. 

This episode, because it has been blown out of proportion, now opens the door for Pakistani dealers of, say, Chinese companies to put out ads about anything and everything in India. What is the ministry of external affairs going to do then?