Raksha Bandhan used to be small and private — a thread tied around a wrist, a whispered prayer, a sweet shared, nothing that needed an audience. Somewhere between the rise of short-video culture and the internet’s constant hunger for “relatable” content, that changed. The festival stopped being just a festival and started becoming a format. Brands now plan entire campaigns around it weeks ahead of time. Influencers plan out “rakhi-tying” reels down to the lighting and the outfits. What was once a spontaneous gesture between siblings has, for many, become something performed for a camera — reshot until it looks effortless.
That shift set the stage for the latest controversy to hit Bollywood’s festive-ad calendar: the backlash over Kriti Sanon’s Raksha Bandhan campaign for jewellery brand GIVA.
The campaign leaned on a warm, simple idea — that the protection Raksha Bandhan celebrates need not be limited to human siblings. Sanon is seen tying a rakhi to her brother, and then to her pet dog, extending the festival’s spirit of care to a four-legged member of the family. It wasn’t an invented gesture either — Sanon has spoken publicly for years about her dogs as family. The ad essentially took a familiar personal habit and turned it into brand content.
That, as it turns out, is exactly where the trouble started.
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Interestingly, the dog barely registered as controversial — most reactions to that detail ranged from amused to indifferent. The real firestorm was about what Sanon wore: a bralette-style blouse paired with a cape and a draped skirt, which a section of social media declared unfit for a “traditional” occasion and out of step with Indian cultural values. The conversation escalated fast, splitting into two camps — one defending cultural sentiment, the other defending a woman’s right to dress as she pleases — with commentary from all corners of the political spectrum weighing in.
Facing mounting pressure, GIVA pulled the ad entirely and put out a statement affirming its respect for Indian traditions, while clarifying that including a pet in the story was simply meant to honour family in its many forms.
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Sanon didn’t let the moment pass quietly. She addressed the criticism directly, rejecting the idea that a woman’s bond with her culture can be measured by her neckline rather than her intentions. Her point, in essence: the substance of a festival lives in what you feel for it, not in what you’re wearing while you mark it.
That framing found real support. Many pointed out that this wasn’t an isolated incident but part of a familiar cycle — women in the public eye getting disproportionately scrutinized for appearance the moment they front a festive campaign, regardless of the actual sentiment behind the work.
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The controversy took a sharper turn when actor-politician Kangana Ranaut weighed in. In an Instagram Story, she called the campaign “intentionally creepy,” and went further than most of the anonymous social media criticism by naming Sanon directly. Ranaut argued that women today have no shortage of clothing options — everything from a lehenga choli to a bikini — and questioned why Sanon would choose what she described as her “bikini/undergarments” to tie a rakhi to her brother.
Sanon hit back the same day without naming Ranaut directly, she posted her own Instagram Story defending both the campaign’s idea and her choice of clothing, reiterating that a festival’s meaning lies in emotion, not outfit — and pointedly asking when society would stop telling women what to wear.
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What made this round of the row land differently is that it wasn’t just “trolls vs. an actor” — it was one prominent woman in public life publicly picking apart another woman’s clothing, dressed up as concern for tradition. It’s a dynamic several commentators online were quick to flag: Ranaut herself built a large part of her early career on bold, glamorous, sometimes overtly revealing red-carpet and film looks, long before she became a Member of Parliament and started speaking as a custodian of “Indian values.” Whether that makes her critique inconsistent, or simply the view of someone who feels she’s since changed her stance, is genuinely a matter of interpretation — but the “she used to wear far less herself” counterpoint was very much part of how the online conversation pushed back on her.
Strip away the noise, and the more interesting story isn’t about hemlines or dogs at all — it’s about framing. A private, lived moment (a real relationship with a sibling, a real bond with a pet) reads very differently once it’s repackaged as promotional material for a jewellery label. Ritual and commerce don’t always sit comfortably together, and when they collide, public reaction tends to target the collision itself rather than the sentiment the ad was trying to express.
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That’s the tightrope brands and celebrities are increasingly walking each festive season. Audiences want moments that feel real, but a “real moment” dressed up as an advertisement can read as performance — and performance built around something considered sacred draws far sharper scrutiny than, say, a sponsored skincare routine would. None of this means personal moments shouldn’t be shared, or that pets have no place in a Raksha Bandhan story. It means the line between living a tradition and selling one needs far more careful handling than it got here.
It’s also worth separating the online pile-on from the substance of the criticism. Not every critic was acting in bad faith — some genuinely felt the ad’s tone clashed with what they associate with the festival, and that’s a legitimate values disagreement rather than pure trolling, even though plenty of the reaction did cross into personal, disproportionate attacks. At the same time, reducing a woman’s cultural sincerity to a costume — one likely shaped as much by a styling team as by her own choice — is a pattern that has played out before with other women in the spotlight, and it’s a fair thing to call out.
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What doesn’t hold up is the idea that one ad backlash “washes away” a career. Sanon’s standing as an actor and entrepreneur — across films, her clothing label, fitness venture, and skincare brand — isn’t erased by a pulled advertisement and a news cycle, however loud it got in the moment.
As festivals keep migrating onto feeds and campaign calendars, the real lesson here isn’t about a bralette or a dog. It’s about how much more deliberate brands and public figures need to be when a sacred, personal ritual becomes the raw material for a sale. 
