"Mera Naam FUHRER (HITLER) - engaging in willful perniciousness or heil good TRADEMARK"


What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would, make the contract voidable by Misrepresentation . . . . . . . . .  

Hitler has been a popular mascot for a host of Indian business, including Indian Ice-cream vendors, Clothing stores, advertising companies, Indian cafés, pool halls, and even as swastika-patterned set of bed linens called, “The Nazi Collection.” (As an article in the Daily Beast notes, the irony of the last item, of course, is that Hitler essentially stole the swastika symbol from Indian art.) Hitler has infiltrated pulp fiction to such an extent, that we have movies named after him, Hero Hitler in Love, a Punjabi comedy was about a man with an explosive temper, the Hindi film Gandhi to Hitler, was a sympathetic portrayal of the dictator’s last days (Gandhi once wrote to the Führer). What is disturbingly common to all these businesses apart from their nomenclature, is that their proprietors don’t understand what all the hoopla is about!
In Trademark Law, maintaining a unique identity is paramount. Therefore, companies choose a name which is snazzy and trademark-able in equal proportions, a name that resonates with the vox populi and the Trademark authorities alike. The best practice will be to make sure a name chosen is “distinctive or arbitrary” and not “merely descriptive”. Although this longstanding wisdom regarding the distinctiveness spectrum is not being challenged, the question of “What constitutes a good trademark” is, and vigorously so.
Take Rajesh Shah, the co-owner of Hitler, a menswear store in Gujarat, he said that his shop was named after his business partner’s grandfather owing to the grandfather’s strict demeanor.
Take Neeraj Kumar, the producer of Hitler Ice cream. He told the Hindustan Times that, he named his batch of cones after his uncle. “One of my uncles is a short-tempered and strict man, so we nicknamed him Hitler, I thought, ‘Why can’t we have a little fun at the expense of my uncle and name the cones after him!’ That was how the name originated.” After receiving scathing comments about the moniker he chose, Kumar went online and found out about the Holocaust. “I want to tell them repeatedly that the name was not given considering Hitler’s bad political steps and what they call as the Holocaust. I was not aware of any such bad thing,” he said. When Hitler ice creams went viral on social media and the twitter-verse was up in arms over the use or abuse of Hitler’s name, Shashi Tharoor tweeted, “Height of tastelessness; Indian ice-cream named after Hitler. Would the Germans name a sausage after Godse?”

Hitler in India: An Origin Story As in Adolf Hitler, the Jew-hating, mass murdering maniac, who killed more than 6 million Jews and other “impure” individuals in concentration camps and attempted to establish a pure Aryan race throughout the world. However, that is not the idea of Hitler that people have in India. In India, “Hitler” is used as an adjective to describe a person who is bossy, cantankerous, or ill-tempered, not genocidal.
As ridiculous as this sounds, Holocaust awareness in India is limited, and large sections of Indians are not aware of who Hitler actually was and what the Holocaust meant. In fact, in Indian public schools, the Holocaust is not even taught. Additionally, Hitler was fighting against the British in World War II, which many Indians immediately assume means that he was pro- Indian. German history is taught in many places to mean that had Hitler not weakened the British during World War II, Britain would never have agreed to India’s Independence. Therefore it might not be an exaggeration to say that for some, Hitler is an anti-colonial hero.
Quite a bit. On a quick perusal of the Trademark, “Hitler”, that there exist a couple of entries for the TM on a wide gamut of products in Classes 5, 9, 13, and 27. Unfortunately, unable to find whether the individual TM applications had in fact been granted, objected or rejected, but the decision to grant a TM for a product named after Hitler lies at the crux of our discussion thus far. Is a Hitler based pharmaceutical a “good trademark”? It is distinctive, sure, but is it morally acceptable to use the name Hitler, a universally tarnished name?
Simply put together, TM office has a greater duty than merely accepting or rejecting TM applications, it also has a duty to educate people as to the cause of rejection, and therefore to instruct them that apathy in any scenario is unacceptable. It is possible that such a decision might be perceived as uppity, ignoring the use of Hitler in Indian Culture and adhering to Western diktats.

Complement this Reading with:
  1. India’s Hitler clothing shop owners to choose new name
  2. Hitler Clothing Store In India Sparks Outrage, Owner Claims Innocence
  3. What’s with India and Hitler?
  4. Registering Offense


Courtesy:  Mayank Sharma (Faculty, IMS Noida)



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