Man says 'no' to food ordered because delivery boy is Muslim

A customer in Hyderabad declined his food order because it was delivered by a Muslim man. The police filed a complaint against the customer and FIR will be lodged soon after an enquiry.

Hyderabad: A police complaint has been lodged against a customer of a food delivery app for allegedly refusing to accept food from a delivery boy as he was a Muslim.

Police inspector P Srinivas said they received a complaint from the executive of Swiggy, Mudassir Suleman on Wednesday saying the customer did not accept the ordered food merely because the delivery boy 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 official said.

Meanwhile, the delivery boy brought the issue to the notice of the Muslim outfit Majlis Bacao Tehreek president Amjed Ullah Khan who posted the matter in his twitter account.

"The customer ordered chicken-65 and requested for a Hindu delivery boy, but Swiggy sent a Muslim boy for delivering the parcel and the customer refused to take the parcel."

When contacted, Swiggy, 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."

The customer who refused to accept the food item could not be contacted.

Incidentally, the food was ordered from a restaurant run by a Muslim, Khan said.

The incident comes over two months after a similar episode in Madhya Pradesh involving Zomato, another food delivery company.

A Zomato customer had declined to accept the food he ordered because it was brought by a non-Hindu, but the company refused to resolve the complaint, saying food does not have religion.

In response to his request for another delivery man, Zomato had tweeted: "Food doesn't have a religion. It is a religion."

The reaction had won the company many admirers.