Hyderabad man refuses to accept food from Muslim delivery person, people slam him online

TIE

The customer, who is a resident of the Aliabad North area, ordered a portion of Chicken 65 from a restaurant that is reportedly owned by Muslim.

New Delhi, 25 Oct: A police complaint was lodged against a Hyderabad resident after he refused to accept an order of food from a Muslim delivery person. The customer, who is a resident of the Aliabad North area, ordered a portion of Chicken 65 from the Grand Bawarchi restaurant at Falaknuma on Swiggy and made an online payment.

 

However, while placing his order, he wrote in the special instructions that the delivery service should provide a delivery person who is Hindu. He had written: “Very less spicy. And, please select Hindu delivery person. All ratings will be based on this”.

 

However, the app which automatically assigns delivery persons did not consider the request. When the delivery person contacted the customer, he refused to accept the order for not adhering to his instructions.

 

The delivery person brought the issue to the notice of the Muslim group Majlis Bacao Tehreek’s president Amjed Ullah Khan, who tweeted about it, and the tweet along with an alleged screenshot of the man’s instructions went viral on social media.

 

An officer from the Shalibanda police station said they had received a complaint from an executive of Swiggy, Mudassir Suleman, which stated that the customer did not accept the ordered food merely because the delivery person was a Muslim.

 

“We are in the process of filing a case against the customer and we will be filing an FIR soon,” the police inspector P Srinivas told news agency PTI.

 

The incident left many fuming and some said the man’s actions were the ‘height of hypocrisy’ given he had ordered food from a restaurant owned by a Muslim, where the cook could also be from the community. While many slammed the customer, some suggested that it might be better if the delivery persons are identified only with their phone numbers, instead of their names, which could reveal their religion.

 

The food delivery app company, in a statement, said “We embrace diversity and respect different points of view. Every order is automatically assigned to delivery executives based on their location and availability, among others, and not based on individual preferences. As an organisation, we do not discriminate between our partners and customers on any grounds.”

 

A similar incident was reported in July, when a man in Madhya Pradesh tagged Zomato in a tweet saying he had cancelled his order as “they allocated a non Hindu rider” for his delivery. Zomato responded saying that ‘food has no religion and the firm’s CEO Deepinder Goyal’s tweet was praised after he said that his company wasn’t sorry to lose any business that comes in the way of its values.