China is reportedly telling restaurant owners to remove any images associated with Islam and messages written in Arabic from their stores.
Reuters reports employees from 11 various restaurants and shops in Beijing had been told by Chinese officials to remove the images and Arabic signs. The stores visited by the news outlet were all selling halal products.
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One shop owner, who along with the rest of them declined to give his name due to the sensitivity of the issue, said a government official told him to cover the “halal” in Arabic on his noodle shop sign and watched him do it before leaving.
“They said this is foreign culture and you should use more Chinese culture,” the noodle shop owner told Reuters.
Several shop owners visited by the news outlet simply covered the Arabic and Islamic imagery and others replaced it with the Chinese term for halal.
It is not immediately clear if all of the roughly 1,000 halal shops and restaurants in Beijing have been told to cover the Arabic script and Muslim symbols.
The move is the latest step in the Chinese government’s push to have religions conform with Chinese culture, as part of a process to "Sinicize" its Muslim population, according to Reuters.
The campaign has reportedly also included having several mosques in China remove Middle Eastern-style domes and replace them with Chinese-style pagodas.
While China has 20 million Muslim residents and freedom of religion in the country, the government still adheres to Communist Party ideology and is pushing to bring religions in line with it.
One shop owner took issue with “erasing” Muslim culture.
“They are always talking about national unity, they’re always talking about China being international. Is this national unity?” a halal butcher shop owner told Reuters.
The body of V.G. Siddhartha, founder of India’s largest coffee chain, was found floating in a river Wednesday, two days after he was first reported missing.
Siddhartha, 60, was last seen by his driver Monday evening near a bridge in Dakshina Kannada district. He reportedly asked him to wait while he went for a walk along the bridge. After not hearing from the coffee tycoon for two hours, the driver contacted police.
“I saw a body floating while I was fishing and then I informed the police. I participated in the rescue operation,” one of the men told the New Delhi Television news channel.
National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) personnel carry the body of missing Indian coffee tycoon V.G. Siddhartha from the banks of Netravati river towards an ambulance after local fishermen found it floating in the coastal city of Mangalore in the southern state of Karnataka on July 31, 2019. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)
An autopsy report will be conducted to confirm the official cause of death.
Police are continuing to investigate the circumstances around the Cafe Coffee Day founder’s death. Several days before his disappearance, Siddhartha sent a letter to employees that appeared to allude to mounting financial problems.
FILE PHOTO: V.G. Siddhartha, chairman of Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd, speaks during a news conference in Mumbai, India, October 7, 2015. REUTERS/Shailesh Andrade/File Photo - RC16E01454B0
“I would like to say I gave it my all. I am very sorry to let down all the people that put their trust in me,” the letter, obtained by the Times of India, read. “I fought for a long time but today I gave up as I could not take any more pressure from one of the private equity partners forcing me to buy back shares, a transaction I had partially completed six months ago by borrowing a large sum of money from a friend.”
He continued: “Tremendous pressure from other lenders nod to me succumbing to the situation.”
Siddhartha went on to say that he was “solely responsible for all mistakes” and that the company’s auditors and senior management were “totally unaware of all my transactions.”
“The law should hold me and only me accountable, as I have withheld this information from everybody including my family," he said.
The body of missing Indian coffee tycoon V.G. Siddhartha is wheeled on a stretcher from an ambulance to a cold storage unit after local fishermen found it floating in the Netravati river in the coastal city of Mangalore in the southern state of Karnataka on July 31, 2019. (STR/AFP/Getty Images)
Cafe Coffee Day was founded in 1996 and now has 1,750 locations throughout India, making it the largest coffee producer in the country, according to the Business Standard. It has also opened locations in Europe as well as in Malaysia and Nepal.
NEW DELHI — V.G. Siddhartha, a wealthy tycoon who beat Starbucks to dominate India’s retail coffee industry but faced personal financial troubles, was found dead on Wednesday, the police said.
The police had carried out an exhaustive search for Mr. Siddhartha, founder of the popular chain Cafe Coffee Day, who was last seen Monday evening on a waterfront bridge outside the coastal city of Mangaluru, in southern India. Fishermen spotted his body floating near the shoreline on Wednesday morning.
Hanumantharaya, a senior police official who goes by one name, said the police were still investigating the cause of death.
Mr. Siddhartha, whose family has been in the coffee business for 130 years, became one of the world’s biggest traders after opening Cafe Coffee Day in 1996, earning him the nickname “the coffee king of India.” The company and its subsidiaries, which recently expanded to other countries in Asia and Europe, employ more than 30,000 people.
But Cafe Coffee Day and its parent organization, Coffee Day Enterprises, were thrown into turmoil in 2017, when the Indian tax authorities raided company offices. They said they had found undisclosed transactions and illegal income, which Mr. Siddhartha denied.
This year, the company’s stock took another hit as Mr. Siddhartha struggled to pay various lenders, leading to a liquidity crunch.
Mr. Siddhartha, his wife, Malavika Hegde, and companies affiliated with them held over 50 percent of the equity in Coffee Day Enterprises.
On Tuesday, the company released a copy of a letter, purportedly written by Mr. Siddhartha, that was addressed to the board of directors. The letter, which appears on Mr. Siddhartha’s letterhead and bears his signature, said that he was facing “a lot of harassment” from the tax authorities, and that he took responsibility for “all mistakes.”
“The law should hold me and only me accountable,” the letter says. “My intention was never to cheat or mislead anybody. I have failed as an entrepreneur.”
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Mr. Siddhartha at one of his Cafe Coffee Day stores in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad in 2015. The tax authorities raided company offices in 2017.CreditSam Panthaky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Business owners in India have long had a tense relationship with the tax authorities. High-profile cases of corruption and fraud by tycoons have engendered public distrust toward entrepreneurs. But critics say that in the name of getting tough on cheats, the authorities sometimes resort to harassment to collect on tax demands, including from honest citizens.
The result is frustration on all sides. The government struggles to collect the tax revenue it needs to fund social programs and build roads and power lines. Businesses struggle to comply with vague tax rules and burdensome enforcement practices. And multinational companies shy away from investing in India, fearful of becoming embroiled in lengthy disputes.
The country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has for years promised to untangle the knot. Campaigning for election ahead of his first term in office in 2014, Mr. Modi’s party inveighed against the “tax terrorism” that it said had soured India’s image in the eyes of big foreign companies.
Since taking power, the Modi government has enacted a national value-added tax that was meant to ease the compliance burden for businesses. Mr. Modi’s surprise decision in 2016 to cancel high-denomination currency notes was intended to force tax dodgers to turn over the cash they had squirreled away to avoid taxes.
But many of the root problems remain, even as institutions such as the World Bank have acknowledged the steps India has taken to make it easier to do business.
The police said that Mr. Siddhartha, who was in his late 50s or early 60s, had told his family he was going to a holiday resort on Monday. But he then asked his driver to take him to Mangaluru, about 200 miles from the company’s headquarters in Bangalore.
As evening set in, Mr. Siddhartha asked the driver to stop near the 30-foot Netravati River bridge outside the city, saying he wanted to walk.
According to local news reports, Mr. Siddhartha asked the driver to meet him on the other side of the bridge and then got on a call. When Mr. Siddhartha did not show up or answer his phone, which was switched off, the driver filed a police report.
After Mr. Siddhartha’s body was recovered, shares in Coffee Day Enterprises fell nearly 20 percent. Calls to the company’s headquarters in Bangalore were not answered on Wednesday, and its stores were ordered closed for the day.
In a statement on Tuesday, Sadananda Poojary, the company secretary and compliance officer, said that Coffee Day Enterprises was cooperating with the Indian authorities and that the company was “professionally managed and led by competent leadership.”
In a letter purportedly written and signed by Siddhartha, which the chain's parent company Coffee Day Enterprises released on Tuesday evening, the coffee tycoon said he was facing "tremendous pressure" from lenders that led to him "succumbing to the situation." The letter was dated July 27.
"I would like to say I gave it my all," the letter says. "I am very sorry to let down all the people that put their trust in me."
Siddhartha had "not been reachable" since Monday evening, Coffee Day Enterprises said in a statement earlier Tuesday. He is believed to have disappeared from a bridge over the Netravati river, where he got out of his car to take a walk,Mangalore police commissioner Sandeep Patil told CNN Business.
In the letter, Siddhartha urged Coffee Day to continue running the business with new management.
"I am solely responsible for all mistakes. Every financial transaction is my responsibility," he wrote.
Shares in Coffee Day Enterprises fell by the maximum daily limit of 20% for a second consecutive day on Wednesday, hitting a new all-time low.
Siddhartha owned 33% of Coffee Day Enterprises, according to a stock exchange filing last month, while his wife and family-owned entities hold another 21%. The company went public in 2015.
Coffee Day also has retail outlets in Austria, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Malaysia and Nepal, and exports coffee to several markets including North America, Europe and the Middle East.
In the letter, Siddhartha listed the coffee chain as well as several other assets — including stakes in multiple tech companies and logistics firm Sical — that he said "can help repay everybody."
"My intention was never to cheat or mislead anybody, I have failed as an entrepreneur," he added. "I hope someday you will understand, forgive and pardon me."
BEIJING (Reuters) - Authorities in the Chinese capital have ordered halal restaurants and food stalls to remove Arabic script and symbols associated with Islam from their signs, part of an expanding national effort to “Sinicize” its Muslim population.
The Arabic script on the signboard of a halal food store is seen covered, at Niujie area in Beijing, China, July 19, 2019. Picture taken July 19, 2019. REUTERS/Stringer
Employees at 11 restaurants and shops in Beijing selling halal products and visited by Reuters in recent days said officials had told them to remove images associated with Islam, such as the crescent moon and the word “halal” written in Arabic, from signs.
Government workers from various offices told one manager of a Beijing noodle shop to cover up the “halal” in Arabic on his shop’s sign, and then watched him do it.
“They said this is foreign culture and you should use more Chinese culture,” said the manager, who, like all restaurant owners and employees who spoke to Reuters, declined to give his name due to the sensitivity of the issue.
The campaign against Arabic script and Islamic images marks a new phase of a drive that has gained momentum since 2016, aimed at ensuring religions conform with mainstream Chinese culture.
The campaign has included the removal of Middle Eastern-style domes on many mosques around the country in favor of Chinese-style pagodas.
China, home to 20 million Muslims, officially guarantees freedom of religion, but the government has campaigned to bring the faithful into line with Communist Party ideology.
It’s not just Muslims who have come under scrutiny. Authorities have shut down many underground Christian churches, and torn down crosses of some churches deemed illegal by the government.
But Muslims have come in for particular attention since a riot in 2009 between mostly Muslim Uighur people and majority Han Chinese in the far western region of Xinjiang, home to the Uighur minority.
Spasms of ethnic violence followed, and some Uighurs, chafing at government controls, carried out knife and crude bomb attacks in public areas and against the police and other authorities.
In response, China launched what it described as a crackdown on terrorism in Xinjiang.
Now, it is facing intense criticism from Western nations and rights groups over its policies, in particular mass detentions and surveillance of Uighurs and other Muslims there.
The government says its actions in Xinjiang are necessary to stamp out religious extremism. Officials have warned about creeping Islamisation, and have extended tighter controls over other Muslim minorities.
‘NEW NORMAL’
Analysts say the ruling Communist Party is concerned that foreign influences can make religious groups difficult to control.
“Arabic is seen as a foreign language and knowledge of it is now seen as something outside of the control of the state,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies Xinjiang.
“It is also seen as connected to international forms of piety, or in the eyes of state authorities, religious extremism. They want Islam in China to operate primarily through Chinese language,” he said.
Kelly Hammond, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas who studies Muslims of the Hui minority in China, said the measures were part of a “drive to create a new normal”.
Beijing is home to at least 1,000 halal shops and restaurants, according to the Meituan Dianping food delivery app, spread across the city’s historic Muslim quarter as well as in other neighborhoods.
It was not clear if every such restaurant in Beijing has been told to cover Arabic script and Muslim symbols. One manager at a restaurant still displaying Arabic said he’d been ordered to remove it but was waiting for his new signs.
Several bigger shops visited by Reuters replaced their signs with the Chinese term for halal - “qing zhen” - while others merely covered up the Arabic and Islamic imagery with tape or stickers.
The Beijing government’s Committee on Ethnicity and Religious affairs declined to comment, saying the order regarding halal restaurants was a national directive.
Slideshow (7 Images)
The National Ethnic Affairs Commission did not respond to a faxed request for comment.
While most shopkeepers interviewed by Reuters said they did not mind replacing their signs, some said it confused their customers and an employee at a halal butcher shop accused authorities of “erasing” Muslim culture.
“They are always talking about national unity, they’re always talking about China being international. Is this national unity?”
Reporting by Huizhong Wu; Additional reporting by Michael Martina; Editing by Se Young Lee and Tony Munroe
