PESTICIDES IN COCA-COLA AND PEPSI - Cultural Anthropology

CA 

PESTICIDES IN COCA-COLA AND PEPSI: 

Consumerism, Brand Image, and Public Interest in a 

Globalizing India 

NEERAJ VEDWAN 

Montclair State University 

“OF FIZZY DRINKS AND FUZZY LAWS” 

In 2003, the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi-based environmental 

NGO, released a report indicating the presence of pesticides, greatly 

exceeding European standards, in a dozen popular beverages sold under the brand 

names of The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo. 1 The revelation of contamination 

in the widely consumed soft drinks and subsequent media coverage were successful 

in getting the government to constitute a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) 

to examine the issue—namely, the lack of appropriate regulations governing the 

quality of commercial bottled beverages—and make policy recommendations. The 

JPC directed the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to come up with appropriate 

standards for bottled beverages sold in the country. The CSE revelations, widely 

publicized through the media coverage, were thus effective in not only grabbing 

public attention and highlighting a number of important environmental and public 

health issues but also changing policy in a relatively short period of time. 

At first glance the decision to focus on contamination in commercial bottled 

beverages may seem an odd one for an environmental NGO. After all, only a 

tiny fraction of the population in India can afford them, and therefore would be 

affected by their contamination, compared to the pervasive problems of drinking 

water scarcity and poor quality. The rationale becomes obvious, however, when 

the recent changes in the wider socioeconomic context are taken into account. In 

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 22, Issue 4, pp. 659–684. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C○ 2007 by 

the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce 

article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ 

reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/can.2007.22.4.659.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:4 

660 

contrast to the problem of water pollution, which is widespread, with few legal 

and political mechanisms available for redress, contamination in Coca-Cola and 

Pepsi was a relatively clear-cut issue. At the root, the CSE focus on the issue of 

contaminated beverages was driven by twin considerations of the identity of the 

parties involved in the conflict: Powerful multinational corporations (MNC), on 

the one hand, and a clamorous middle class on the other hand. As the CSE official, 

in charge of the analysis of Coca-Cola and Pepsi products, commented: 

Our original intention was to highlight the problem of unregulated pesticide 

industry in the country and its effect on the environment, especially groundwater. 

Since Coke and Pepsi products are perceived as high quality, by analyzing 

them and demonstrating the presence of contaminants, we could get out the 

message of widespread contamination, effectively, and create pressure on the 

government to act. If we had done the same thing with municipal drinking 

water, no one would have noticed. [personal interview, June 23, 2004] 

In a strategic bit of thinking, the CSE decision was to use the contamination in 

well-known international brands, whose quality was often taken for granted by 

consumers, to underscore the problem of a poorly regulated pesticide industry that 

continues to have serious environmental and public health impacts (see Textbox 1). 

The other reason for the CSE focus on Coca-Cola and Pepsi beverages was 

precisely that it is a product category popular among and consumed mostly by 

the middle class. The CSE thus sought to channel the anticipated middle-class 

outrage into exerting pressure on the government to create regulations that would 

ultimately have to confront the problem of nonpoint source pollution—the source 

of pesticides in bottled beverages. 2 This was a clear departure from the historical 

pattern of environmental movements in India that have focused, using grassroots 

action, on such problems as deforestation, displacement of people as a result of 

development projects, involving, for instance, construction of dams, and access to 

protected areas, such as national parks. Most of these issues have the increased threat 

to livelihood security from environmental degradation as their salient dimension 

(Guha 1999). 

However, with the increased pace of urbanization, industrialization, and rural– 

urban migration, all of which have led to a deepening of urban environmental 

problems, another battlefield for the environment, with its own characteristic 

discourses, institutions and mobilization strategies has emerged and expanded over 

the last two decades. In a postcolonial context characterized by rapid and uneven 

economic change, largely unrestrained by environmental and social safeguards, the

PESTICIDES IN SOFT DRINKS 

TIMELINE OF COLA-PESTICIDES CONTROVERSY 

Aug 6, 2003: The Center for Science and Environment (CSE) releases report about 

pesticides in Coca-Cola and Pepsi beverages. 

Aug 8, 2003: PepsiCo files a petition in Delhi High Court, challenging the reliability of 

CSE findings, and calls for a review by an experts committee. 

Aug 13: Several state governments order pesticide tests of Pepsi and Coca-Cola products. 

Aug 13: India’s Supreme Court declines to hear a Coca-Cola petition, challenging CSE 

findings. 

Aug 22: A Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) is set up to determine whether CSE 

report on pesticides is correct, and to suggest criteria for evolving appropriate standards for 

carbonated drinks and other beverages. 

Aug 30: The central government issues a draft modification of the Prevention of Food 

Adulteration Act, clubbing all beverages together for the purpose of formulating standards. 

Nov 2003: The JPC directs the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) to formulate appropriate 

standards for carbonated beverages. 

Feb 4, 2004: The JPC report, confirming CSE findings, is presented to Parliament. 

Feb 13, 2004: The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare directs the pesticide subcommittee 

of the Central Committee for Food Standards (CCFS) to come up with recommendations 

regarding pesticide levels. 

June 23, 2004: The pesticide residues subcommittee of CCFS recommends yearlong 

monitoring of carbonated beverages. 

In 2004–2005, The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo claimed that pesticides in sugar— 

an ingredient of soft drinks—contributed to the pesticides in the finished product. Therefore, 

pesticides in sugar should be studied before adoption of any standards for carbonated beverages. 

July 15, 2004: The BIS finalizes draft standards for carbonated beverages. 

July 27, 2005: The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare issues notification that water 

used in making carbonated beverages must follow the standards for bottled water. 

Oct 2005: Standards are finalized by the BIS. 

March 2006: Standards are confirmed but not notified. 

Aug 2, 2006: Nearly three years after its first study, CSE releases another study of beverages, 

documenting presence of pesticides at unsafe levels in most Coca-Cola and Pepsi brands. On the 

basis of the report, several states ban the sale of Coca-Cola and Pepsi products in educational 

institutions. Bans in educational institutions are still in effect in several states. 

Source: Adapted from CSE (2003). 

question of how to reduce the often-destructive effects of such runaway growth, 

in the face of state apathy and even complicity, has never been more important. 

What has greatly complicated the task of reining in environmental degradation 

and social dislocation is the increasing powerlessness of the people most directly 

affected—tribal groups, lower castes, rural landless and the urban poor—by the 

undesirable effects of economic and industrial development. In the postliberalization 

India, where the focus of economic policies has shifted from poverty alleviation in 

661


662 

rural areas to engendering a middle class, the historically marginalized groups have 

experienced further disenfranchisement. After the waning of the ideology of statist 

development in the 1980s, “the market-oriented consumerist paradigm seemed 

poised to offer an attractive alternative, particularly to the up-and-coming ‘middle 

classes’ and those in the private and media sectors who would cater to and define 

their interests” (Mazzarella 2003:34). 

The CSE’s strategic thinking, which in a nutshell involved interpellating the 

environment with middle-class consumerism, bore fruit and was responsible for 

the relatively successful trajectory of its “campaign.” The strategy is premised on 

leveraging an increasingly assertive and burgeoning middle class for which the environment 

has emerged as a particularly contested site of consumption (Baviskar 

2003). This article, through a case study of the Coca-Cola–Pepsi pesticide controversy, 

seeks to answer several interconnected questions: Why did the pesticide issue 

garner the attention it did? Can the middle-class relationship with the environment, 

as yet another consumable, succeed in shaping environmental consciousness, and, 

perhaps, stem environment degradation, where the struggle for environmental justice 

seems to have exhausted its promise? In what ways can the media and the state 

response to the Coca-Cola–Pepsi pesticide controversy provide us with a template 

to understand the evolving state–society–corporate relationship? To tackle the last 

question, it is important to understand the tensions and disjunctures that constitute 

the rapidly shifting middle-class identity and agency, vis-à-vis the role of the state 

and the multinationals. What are the potentialities of a consumerist project based 

on the needs and perceptions of the urban middle class, to forge a new compact 

between the state, the private sector, and civil society? What are the political limits 

of a mobilization strategy seeking to harness the middle-class sense of entitlement 

rooted in its relative sociopolitical clout and economic power? 3 

To be able to answer these questions, it is important that a number of interrelated 

developments in India be examined critically. These span the gamut from 

institutional change, on the one hand, to the shift in middle-class sensibilities and 

subjectivities, on the other hand. A variety of institutions, particularly environmental 

NGOs, the MNCs, and mass media have become influential actors in increasingly 

globalized discursive fields and have emerged as key sites for the production and 

circulation of images and representations of middle-class identity and aspirations. 

Thematically, this article has three major foci: 

New institutionalized form of environmental activism—publicity savvy, technologically 

sophisticated and aware of the intricacies and politics of policy 

making;


Media-ted consumer perceptions of multinationals and their products; and 

Corporate response to the revelations about pesticides. 

Specifically, I focus on the role of consumerism as a powerful organizing 

trope that permeates the imagination and practices of the middle class and their 

interlocutors—the mass media—while opening up spaces for sociopolitical realignments 

and action. Consumerism offers the tantalizing possibility of reinvention of 

the self, unrestrained by the contingencies of history and place. One of the goals of 

this article is to describe, using the Coca-Cola–Pepsi pesticide controversy, what 

happens when the promise of consumerism collides with a recalcitrant social reality. 

To this end I analyze an array of public reactions to the Coca-Cola–Pepsi controversy 

using a wide range of media commentary—based on more than 500 news articles 

taken from English-language “national” newspapers such as the Indian Express, Times 

of India, and interviews with key personnel at CSE. An important source of information 

in this regard was a collection of newspaper articles and other media reports 

assembled by CSE (2003). 

The rest of this article is organized as follows: In the next two sections, I 

synoptically trace the emergence of institutionalized urban environmentalism and a 

globalized mass media in India. Both are important nodes in the ongoing reconceptualization 

of public interest, increasingly embedded in the logic of consumerism 

and disenchanted from the statist project of the preliberalization period. In subsequent 

section, I discuss the middle classes and their (self-) identification with a 

globalized culture of consumerism. This is followed by a section on the negotiated 

coproduction of brand image in the context of the pesticide controversy. Finally, I 

present a summary of the social and political potential and limitations of the notion 

of public interest rooted in a reworked corporate–society–state relationship. 

GLOBALIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE IN INDIA 

The CSE is representative of a breed of environmental organizations of fairly 

recent vintage in India. Started and run by professionals, often of urban middleclass 

background with degrees in engineering, these organizations are focused on 

environmental issues arising out of urbanization and industrialization in India. The 

CSE, for instance, was founded by engineer-turned-environmentalist Anil Agrawal, 

and has focused from its inception on air and water pollution in urban areas CSE 

(1997). 

An important aspect of this “new” environmentalism is its global orientation, 

both in tracing the origins of and the possible solutions to the environmental 

problems resulting from an ever-expanding orbit of industrialization and ancillary 663


664 

activities (Agrawal and Narain 1991). The Coca-Cola–Pepsi campaign is of a piece 

with one of the earliest issues taken up by CSE, namely global warming and the 

injustice inherent in the demand of the developed countries for the imposition 

of caps on greenhouse gas emissions by the developing countries. The position 

on global warming attests to its international orientation and sensitivity to the 

structural inequities of the global political economy. Environmental organizations 

such as Greenpeace play a bridging role between the concerns of the affected local 

communities and global environmental discourses centered on issues such as 

biosafety and public health, and entailing conceptions of accountability in governance, 

transparency, sustainability, and efficiency (Hindu 2005a, 2005b). Similarly, 

the business practices of The Coca-Cola Company in India, and elsewhere, have 

come under increased scrutiny, internationally, from networks of environmental 

and human rights groups. After the adverse impacts of Coca-Cola plants on the 

environment—especially groundwater overexploitation and the effects on local 

communities—became widely known, a number of U.S. universities responded by 

banning Coca-Cola products on their campuses. 4 The increasing enmeshing of environmental 

and broadly “civic” (Chatterjee 2004) concerns has led to the blurring 

of the boundary between various environmentalisms and their seemingly divergent 

objectives. One of the results has been the increased embededness of environmental 

NGOs in international networks of donors and supporters, thus leading to the mobilization 

of significant resources, and providing visibility and legitimacy to these 

issues. 

Another outcome has been that the role of the environmental NGOs is increasingly 

to translate what would be local concerns related to sectional interests—often 

pertaining to minorities, albeit affluent ones—into an environmental vocabulary 

with universalist claims. The sense of environmental entitlement is often expressed 

in the language of rights, such as, the “right to clean air,” which in turn is grounded 

in the scientistic discourse of individual risk and public health. What is elided in this 

discourse is the disproportionate burden borne by the working poor for enforcing 

these “environmental rights” on the behalf of affluent minorities. Therefore, in their 

discursive construction of the environment as a site for consumption, the new environmentalism 

effaces production and producers—an ideological sleight-of-hand 

it shares with much of the neoliberal dogma. 5 Middle-class environmental organizations, 

unable to mobilize and sustain broad coalitions, have thus increasingly 

resorted to the use of courts in coaxing an apathetic state to action, a strategy 

that has been well documented to lead to outcomes congruent with middle-class 

interests (Greenough 2006).


LIBERALIZATION AND MASS MEDIA 

One of the key aspects related to the increase in the size and influence of the 

middle class has been the concomitant change in the mass media composition and 

outlook. I have focused specifically on the print media—mass-circulated Englishlanguage 

newspapers, mainly—which has seen a dramatic shift in the last decade or 

so in their content, to project middle-class values and concerns. Prasoon Sonwalkar 

(2002) terms the shift in emphasis as part of the “Murdochization” of the Indian 

media. Increasingly, the newspapers are run as purely profit-driven enterprises, 

with the focus on maximizing advertising revenues, often resulting in the passing 

of even editorial reigns into the hands of managers. 6 In describing this as a move 

from the “by-line” to the “bottom-line,” Sonwalkar (2002:829) contrasts it with the 

primarily nation-building and consciousness-raising objectives that the media had 

pursued through the colonial and postcolonial phase up to the 1960s. Prominent 

sections of media have emerged as an all-too-willing vehicle for the articulation 

and vociferous advocacy of middle-class interests, using a language and sensibility 

whose affinities with the neoliberal dogma are strikingly apparent (Appadurai 1996). 

Media commentary following the revelations of pesticides in Coca-Cola and Pepsi 

products reveals an interesting catalogue of metaphors and symbols—some of 

historical provenance, others more improvisational—which indicate an ongoing 

flux in the ideological frameworks. Most interestingly, for the purpose of this 

article, the entire coverage is saturated with the business-world jargon, involving 

brand image, brand equity, and such. In fact, the controversy was predominantly 

perceived and analyzed in terms of its effect on the image of these well-known 

brands. Conceptualizations of corporate responsibility, consumer choice, and the 

role of the state are all refracted through the lens of brand, of which Coca-Cola and 

Pepsi are clearly regarded as exemplars. 

MIDDLE CLASSES AND THE CULTURE OF CONSUMERISM 

In 1991, India embarked on a program of liberalizing its economy, the cornerstones 

of which were privatization of public-sector enterprises, increased solicitation 

of foreign investment, disavowal of policies aimed at import substitution, and “reform” 

of the labor markets. The broad socioeconomic changes had the consequence 

of leading to a sizable expansion in the middle class, 7 changes in its character and 

composition, and its transformed relationship to consumption. 

What is emphasized in the neoliberal discourse was how a state-controlled 

economy or, more accurately, “mixed economy,” 8 had inhibited consumer choice, 

whose unleashing is depicted as both an end as well as means of economic growth. 665


666 

The proliferation in the market of global brands following the opening up of the 

economy was touted as a major achievement. This was no accident as one of the 

most commonly used justifications for liberalization was that the state control of the 

economy, by stifling competition, had led to inefficient monopolies and consequently 

the lack of “quality” products in the market. It is important, however, to consider 

the meaning of quality in relational terms, rather than simply as a set of moreor-less 

objective intrinsic product attributes. For instance, the country of origin of 

commodities became a rallying point for quality concerns. The global power brands, 

of which Coca-Cola and Pepsi are exemplars, came to be prized because of their 

scarcity and for their alluring whiff of forbidden lifestyles in exotic locales. Products 

from “abroad”—in the preliberalization era, mostly smuggled or procured through 

social and family networks and, therefore, highly restricted in their availability— 

were considered benchmarks of quality. Therefore, the liberalization of the economy 

and the flooding in of the foreign MNCs were perceived as being synonymous with 

the coming home of “abroad” (Fernandes 2000a:614) or, in other words, progress. 

Local products in this scheme of thinking become proxies for provincialism, 

whereas penetration by global brands indicates the desirable “global convergence 

around Western values and consumption patterns” (Applbaum 2000:260). In this 

narrative of empowerment, evolution in consumer taste is presented as being in 

sync with “innate universal psychological tendencies that transcend local culture” 

(Applbaum 2000:260). Brands thus become ideal vehicles for transcending the disabling 

effects of historical legacies. The result is that the pathologies of place appear 

surmountable through consumption and “the . . . boundaries between citizenship 

and consumerism are blurred” (Mazzarella 2003:34). 

The media, print and electronic, regularly hail the emergence of the “new” 

middle classes as a radical and welcome departure from a socialist past of artificial 

shortages, enforced austerity, and general dysfunctionality. Mass-mediated imaginaries 

(Appadurai 1996; Favero 2003) comprising scripts and models transcend 

national narratives and traditions, and play a constitutive role with respect to the 

shifting middle-class identity. In this perspective, the “new” middle class, unencumbered 

by the shibboleths of a dreary postcolonial past, has finally shrugged off the 

contretemps to emerge as the catalyst for historical change. Miller’s insight from 

his study of Trinidadian consumers is resonant here: “Their being Trinidadian is increasingly 

linked to a sense of their being global, with similar rights and expectations 

to those of any metropolitan area” (1997:335). One common example that is often 

presented in the print media discussion of the vibrancy of postliberalization India 

is the contrast between the current rates of GDP growth, pegged at 7–8 percent,


and the earlier so-called Hindu growth rate of 3–4 percent for the four decades 

following independence in 1947. The middle classes in this discourse will lead to the 

long-overdue integration of the Indian economy with the global economic system, 

and, thus, to India gaining its rightful place in the comity of nations (Fernandes 

2000b; Khilnani 1997). 

The “culture of consumerism” therefore is located at the uncertain conjunction 

of a number of interconnected conceptions of the state, private sector—specifically 

the foreign MNCs—and empowered citizen–consumer. The ongoing reconfiguration 

of the discourses centered on these entities, however, remains partial, and even 

internally contradictory. Popular attitudes toward the state, for instance, while being 

contemptuously dismissive of its capacity—not surprising in light of the state’s 

abysmal record in providing basic amenities—retain expectations that somehow 

these services will ultimately be made available. This paradoxical relationship stems 

from the fact that the state in India, like many others in the developing world, is 

simultaneously omnipresent and weak. 9 The emerging middle class, newly economically 

empowered, however, finds itself surrounded with deep and endemic 

poverty, destitution and lawlessness, all of which contribute to a heightened sense 

of insecurity and the precariousness of its own position. 10 This feeling of beleaguered 

existence mingles uneasily with sometimes virulent strains of triumphalism 

arising from having escaped the sociocultural morass with which the middle classes 

perceives themselves as surrounded (Mawdsley 2004; Varma 1998). 

A similar set of contradictory attitudes prevail with regard to the MNCs that 

are at once seen as bearers of high standards, accountable, and yet, liable to run amok 

if unrestrained by an ever-vigilant state. 11 Moreover, the culture of consumerism, 

despite its euphoric invocation of such buzzwords as choice and freedom, is riddled 

with strains of moral ambiguity. Analysis of media reports of the coverage of the 

controversy indicates that the presence of pesticides in beverages is widely construed 

a “problem.” The divergences and dissonances in the otherwise celebratory discourse 

of consumerism reflect deep societal divisions on fundamental issues such as the 

socially appropriate models of economic growth, the tradeoffs between economic 

growth and equity, appropriate role of the state, and the suitability of domestic versus 

foreign corporations. I argue that the effects of globalization, especially unbridled 

consumerism, in expanding the circulation of branded goods in India have produced 

a complex mix of responses and readings that are often contradictory. 12 In striving to 

make sense of the apparently autonomous and often dizzying pace of economic and 

cultural change, media coverage utilizes discursive strategies that are historically 

informed and yet highly contingent and represent an interesting catalogue of views 667


668 

and attitudes on a host of broader issues related to the role and responsibilities 

of MNCs and private enterprise in defining and catering to the public good. The 

remainder of this article is devoted to delineating some of these themes that recur 

in the media commentary and to exploring the potential and limits of consumerism 

as a transformative social force. 

CORPORATE MANAGEMENT OF BRAND IMAGE: A VIABLE BASIS 

FOR A NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT? 

One of the constant refrains in the media commentary, even when unsympathetic 

to MNCs, pertains to the presumed centrality of brand image in their 

marketing calculus. The impetus for corporate responsibility, it is reasoned, will 

come not necessarily from the development of a social conscience but from a 

self-interested concern for preserving and enhancing brand equity in a fiercely 

competitive marketplace. Numerous narratives involve favorable juxtaposition of 

MNCs with the domestic companies, and of course, the state, which are described 

as largely unencumbered by such concerns. The MNCs, however, are supposed to 

have too much to lose by allowing their image to be tarnished. A commentator in 

Financial Times made clear the hierarchy of consumer expectations: 

It may not be much comfort to the managers of PepsiCo and Coca-Cola . . . but 

the soft drink campaign is a back-handed complement to big international 

brands. The CSE is relying on the fact that Indians expect little from the 

government but want good service from private companies and demand the 

highest standards of all from foreign multinationals. [2003] 

The potential of brands and brand images to provide a platform in which 

consumer preferences and corporate goals can be brought together in a dynamic, 

mutually beneficial, dialogue, however, appears premised on specific assumptions 

about branding. Despite the attempts of brand managers to evolve generic formulae, 

the use of which will result in a linear and unidirectional transfer of content—from 

the corporation to the consumer—the communicative process remains open-ended 

and prone to slippages. In a situation rife with indeterminacy, trust is often invoked 

as a substitute for the elusive profile of consumer expectations. The vice president 

of The Coca-Cola Company described its efforts to win back consumer trust, in 

the aftermath of the controversy, as work in progress: “We are still conceptualizing 

our consumer-connect exercise—this could include television, print, and online 

advertising, on-ground activity and meeting up with retailers” (Bhushan 2003).


What is referred to, above, as the “consumer-connect exercise,” by The Coca- 

Cola Company vice president, is by no means a straightforward task even for a 

company with the advertising budget and over a century’s worth of experience 

selling globally. In emerging markets like India, brand managers and advertising 

professionals responsible for creating and projecting appealing brand images, especially 

for globally well-known products, are confronted with the daunting task of 

crafting messages that resonate culturally while preserving the foreign cachet of the 

brand. In a sense, the brand managers are faced with the impossible task of reconciling 

the global with the local when they both are defined in nearly mutually exclusive 

terms. 13 To impart their products a positive valence, the brand dimension that has 

been highlighted the most by Coca-Cola and Pepsi is their foreign origin. Repetitive 

use of the word international to describe the brands is calculated to tap into the aura 

of quality that surrounds the term in India. Coca-Cola and Pepsi thus emphasize 

the “high quality” of their products, unfailingly meeting international 14 —that is, 

not merely Indian—standards. This claim to superiority, however, became hard to 

sustain because the same companies later turned around and sought to explain away 

the presence of pesticides as a problem common to most food and water consumed 

in the country. 

Perhaps the biggest miscalculation on the part of the corporations was their 

belief in their power to unilaterally shape consumer perceptions. To the contrary, 

brands are coproduced by consumers and producers in ideological fields, culturally 

constituted and historically specific. Therefore, despite The Coca-Cola Company’s 

and PepsiCo’s sustained efforts to steer the debate toward what they considered the 

strengths of their brands, namely, their internationally renowned and sophisticated 

image, other perspectives entered the debate surrounding the pesticide controversy, 

which were detrimental to their efforts. The strategy floundered because it failed to 

take into account the plasticity of brand images, which are open to reinterpretation, 

and often in ways that can subvert the messages that MNCs want to convey. For 

instance, one of the themes that came to dominate the discussions in the press 

pertained to the reactions of perceived betrayal of trust among the consumers. 

“These are not small companies with limited resources; indeed, the soft drink 

giants are companies that promise global quality products without differentiating 

between standards in rich and poor countries” (Business Standard 2003a). 

What is interesting here is the inversion of meaning achieved by an interpretation 

of “international” that differs markedly from the MNC’s interpretation of the 

same. Because one of the principal appeals of the MNC products is that they are 

“foreign,” 15 and therefore of presumably high quality, the charge of lower product 669


670 

standards in India struck a particularly sensitive chord among the consumers. It 

undermined the postcolonial elites’ dream of achieving global citizenship through 

consumption of internationally recognized brands, a pivot of the emerging middleclass 

identity, and enthusiastically promoted by the media as the raison d’être of 

liberalization and globalization. Therefore, “consumers could not believe that their 

trusted brands were not so trustworthy after all” (Girimaji 2003). In a postnational 

world in which “capitalism and democracy have been coronated champions of the 

moral order as complementary advocates of the idea that choice and freedom are 

the privilege of every individual, irrespective of national or communal boundaries” 

(Applbaum 2000:276), the MNC failure to deliver on its promise of treating alike 

all its consumers was particularly galling, sullying the glamour of Coca-Cola and 

Pepsi, and threatening to undermine confidence in one of the central claims of 

globalization. Therefore, 

what is striking about the CSE report is the evidence that the same brand when 

sold in the US does not contain the unwelcome traces of the toxins. Which 

begs the question why multibillion dollar enterprises do not think it is worth 

their while to maintain uniform standards for their products worldwide. That 

would cut into profits certainly but surely it is worth the effort in the interests 

of brand image and consumer confidence. [New Indian Express 2003] 

The near unanimity in media reports on the damage to the consumer trust in 

Coca-Cola and Pepsi, however, arises not only from the perceived gap between the 

promise of their brands and practice. This breach, if indeed it was perceived as such, 

is far too common in the Indian context to have invited anything more than a cynical 

shrug of the shoulders; rather what the brand images proved unable to provide was a 

substantive basis to the corporate claims of being “trustworthy.” In other words, the 

brands’ claim, by virtue of being internationally known, of possessing trust for all 

time and places—an unsustainable essentialist premise—was unable to withstand 

the political ire of seemingly apolitical consumers. The corporations discovered to 

their dismay (and surprise) that their supposedly culture-proof brands were placed 

in cultural-economic fields where there were no historically legitimized metrics of 

corporate trust for them to capitalize on. 

As the notion of trust came to be deployed in a way so as to subvert the “international” 

image of their brands, The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo attempted 

to infuse trust with a culturally specific personal content. 16 In press releases and 

advertisements, the companies were described as “families,” pointedly conveying an 

image incompatible with the sinister business of selling pesticide-laced products, as


was being alleged, according to the MNCs, by an irresponsible NGO. In a sociocultural 

context, in which trust is specifically considered a “traditional” intrafamilial 

attribute, the MNCs proclaimed that their brands are of a “quality you can trust—all 

our 5000 employees of Coca-Cola India, our families, our children and loved ones, 

proudly consume our soft drinks that we serve you” (Telegraph 2003). 

The MNCs also tried to up the ante by casting aspersions on the integrity of CSE, 

accusing it in effect of “untrustworthiness.” The MNC efforts to be “on message” 

with regard to underscoring the global dimension of their products, and attacking an 

“irresponsible” NGO—code for anti–free market and reflexively anti-American— 

was designed to press all the right kinds of buttons with the middle classes. The 

strategy, however, also unintentionally succeeded in casting the campaign as a battle 

between unequals, in which a miniscule albeit principled and tenacious NGO was 

fighting gigantic and arrogant MNCs. “She is David to the MNC Goliath,” proclaimed 

an article in the Deccan Chronicle (2003), about Sunita Narain, director of CSE, 

adding that “Pepsi and Coke hate her guts but Sunita Narain has the public on her 

side.” Even her gender was brought into play when she was termed a “warrior 

princess” (Shukla 2003a). Moreover, notwithstanding the controversy surrounding 

the discovery of pesticides, she, personally, was beyond reproach—it was felt that 

“there is no difference of opinion over one of her attributes that her heart is in the 

right place” (Shukla 2003a). 

Perhaps, the most paradoxical act to undo the effects of bad publicity came 

from the PepsiCo CEO when he publicly opposed the adoption of European norms 

for beverages sold in India. Taking a position that bore uncanny resemblance to 

the cultural nationalist line, but only in being an inversion of it, he claimed “the 

European norms will allow control of management of resources and policy making 

to be dictated from afar.” Further, “this will act to the detriment of farmers, 

manufacturers and service and product providers. If India adopts EU food laws, for 

example, 90 percent of our groundnut crop would be inedible because of aflatoxin 

standards” (Business Standard 2003b). According to him, therefore, the adoption of 

European (read foreign) norms will be akin to surrendering national sovereignty, 

in the unrealistic attempt to meet the consumer demand for political parity by 

sacrificing the Indian producer in the international marketplace. 

The CEOs of The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo came together in an 

unprecedented act of cooperation in the face of what they called a “witch hunt,” 17 

to counter the damage done to their brand image. “These are wild allegations. We 

are sure of our product quality and are open to testing by accredited independent 

laboratories and by experienced people,” (Indian Express 2003) declared the CEOs 671


672 

of The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo in a joint press conference. The Coca- 

Cola Company CEO added that “the allegation is serious and it has the potential to 

tarnish the image of our brands in the country. If this continues we will consider 

legal recourse” (Economic Times 2003a). The offensive continued in several full-page 

advertisements taken out, including one by The Coca-Cola Company that declared, 

even as the government investigations were pending, that “the most valuable brand 

in the world makes no compromises on the quality of beverages it serves Indian 

consumers” (Telegraph 2003). Soon afterward, there was a shift in the strategy when 

The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo quietly decided to drop their libel suit against 

CSE, an action the CEO of PepsiCo justified as a step to reduce the risk of harm to 

their brand equity. “Taking CSE to court won’t improve our brand image” (Business 

Line 2003a). 

The trajectory of the response to CSE’s findings indicate MNC efforts aimed 

at damage control, especially after the initial reaction, which was widely described 

as arrogant, dismissive, and self-injurious even by the staunchly corporate-friendly 

business press. Probusiness newspapers felt compelled to offer advice that they 

considered to be sensible, for once shedding their cynicism. Despite the reluctance 

to engage in what they called “MNC-bashing,” the business and financial media 

blamed MNC response for their woes. “Sensitive brands are built by sensitive people 

. . . sensitive brands make for themselves a future that is pretty much insulated 

from the vagaries of the market at large” (Business Line 2003b). Comments such as 

“it is a pity that the Cola giants have failed to see the basic point about building 

trust and relationship with their customers” (Bhattacharya 2003), had the tone of 

disappointment writ large over them and sought to drill in what was perceived 

as the missing common sense in the action of The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo. 

This is “not consumer raj,” (Business Standard 2003d) was uttered as a damning 

indictment of state-bureaucratic failure, in a manner reminiscent of the utopian 

idealism that the media often accused votaries of leftist politics of espousing. Ultimately, 

however, there was broad agreement that the solution to the pesticide 

problem lies in wholeheartedly embracing neoliberalism regimes of discipline, and 

in swearing allegiance to the primacy of brand image as the new currency. Despite 

the recognition that the markets may not work well without the requisite regulatory 

safeguards, all-round self-interested behavior could provide the solution: “In 

the long run we need stronger accountability from both NGOs and corporations. 

Till then, let society levy penalties through loss of reputation, on NGOs as well 

as corporations. CSE depends on brand value no less than Pepsi” (Economic Times 

2003b).


The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo were in some senses victims of their 

own success. For example, one of the principal ways in which brands gain recognition 

and positive associations is by sponsoring sports and cultural events (Klein 

2002). Hence, the huge endorsement demand for cricketers in India, and offers 

of extremely lucrative contracts, to be featured in advertisements promoting particular 

soft-drink brands. At the receiving end of the corporate money, the MNC 

sponsorship of cultural and sports events is not only actively solicited for monetary 

reasons but also considered a stamp of legitimacy. The reasoning often used is that 

why would a prestigious corporation, like The Coca-Cola Company or PepsiCo, 

choose to lend its name to a dubious cause. The ramifications for the MNCs of this 

eager reception, however, are mixed, as the following example shows. MNCs in 

India continue to successfully make inroads into diverse “lifeworlds,” as manifested 

in their sponsoring of religious festivals. The regional religious festival of “Durga 

Puja,” which is celebrated in Bengal, has come in recent times to acquire a scale 

and ostentatiousness not seen earlier. Corporate sponsorships enable the increased 

spending on “the massive show of lights and innovative mediums,” as “opulence and 

showmanship have grabbed center stage” (Business Line 2003c) during celebrations. 

These competitive religious displays, as a form of economics-fueled cultural assertion, 

have intensified in the postliberalization period and are reminiscent of Miller’s 

observations in his study of consumer culture in the Caribbean that “the notion of 

‘culture’ in Trinidad is virtually synonymous with that of competition” (1997:314). 

In the aftermath of the pesticides controversy, some Puja organizers took 

the unprecedented step of turning down Coca-Cola–Pepsi sponsorships, saying 

that “they have decided to stay away from the cola companies till the issue was 

resolved” 18 (Business Line 2003c). This example shows that brand ubiquity, especially 

in cultural and religious domains, is not without risks for the MNCs. On the one 

hand, branding of religious festivals is a marker of increased consumer willingness 

to inject commerce into the domain of the “sacred,” but, on the other hand, it 

is interpreted as a promise, and introduces strains of moral expectations in the 

consumer–corporate relationship. Brands when incorporated, even peripherally, in 

systems of cultural signification may, therefore, be evaluated in unanticipated ways 

and corporations risk losing control over the “message.” 

The corporate attempts to manage their brand image and, by extension, consumer 

perceptions and responses, therefore, fell significantly short of their totalizing 

goals. The consumers did not speak to The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo in 

some immutable psychological grammar of personal needs, but the brands were 

actively recruited in the ongoing political theater. An example of this, when the 673


674 

“foreign” cachet of Coca-Cola and Pepsi was turned on its head into a liability, is 

provided by the mode of agitation, or “peformative aspects of protest” (Orlove 

1997:235) organized by several cultural nationalist organizations that took to the 

streets against the MNCs. The act of public destruction of Coca-Cola and Pepsi 

bottles was a purposive allusion to Gandhi’s political strategy of economic boycott 

of British (foreign) products, one of whose prominent techniques was to organize 

bonfires of British mill-made cloth. 19 In one stroke, the appellation of “foreign” was 

transmuted, from being an evocation of luxury and refinement, into a symbol of an 

oppressive and alien political power bent on economic exploitation. The bonfire, 

metaphorical in the case of Coca-Cola and Pepsi, is an intensely personal statement 

as well. It implies the willingness and the resolve to renounce something that is 

temporally important in the service of the greater good. “Alternatives” to Coca- 

Cola and Pepsi, mainly indigenous products, such as buttermilk and homemade 

lemonade, also gained ground, some of which had the same contaminated water, as 

Coca-Cola and Pepsi, as their main ingredient. 20 In this instance, it is the equation 

of “foreign” with “impure” and the “domestic” with “pure” that enables the symbolic 

inversion of the meaning of quality, and manages to elide the issue of contamination 

out of the picture. 21 

CONSUMERISM AS ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST: LIMITATIONS 

AND POSSIBILITIES 

What does the Coca-Cola–Pepsi pesticide controversy, and the subsequent 

policy response, tell us about the political possibilities of social consumerism? I 

submit that it offers important insights into the ongoing realignment between the 

state, society, and MNCs, and how public interest is conceptualized and contested in 

the public arena. Consumerism, despite its deterritorialized discourse, universalist 

pretensions, and unabashed narcissism can only be configured socially in fields 

that are culturally and ideologically constituted. Brand images of pesticide-tainted 

soft drinks being culturally mediated, the efforts of The Coca-Cola Company and 

PepsiCo to mold public opinion, notwithstanding their massive advertising budgets, 

were at best partially successful. Even the association with Bollywood glamour and 

euphoric endorsements from cricket icons failed to neutralize the negative media 

coverage. As the CSE said of the gyrating efforts of Bollywood stars in one of its 

reports: “they danced and sang to seduce us to go back to colas. But that is their 

job. They are paid actors.” 

Marketing efforts of The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo attempt to invoke 

a symbolic community—a community of feeling—transnational and based on


personal taste. The promise of these products entails a vicarious pursuit of pleasure 

through opening up of realms of experience otherwise off bounds to people. 

The problem, from the perspective of corporations, arises when consumers insist 

on a political reading of pleasure. The presence of pesticides is an unmistakable 

symbol of inequality and reminds consumers of the precarious nature of their pleasure 

worlds. In the end, perceptions of injustice remain powerful antidotes to the 

tastefully choreographed seductions of cola peddlers. 

But how real are the democratizing effects of consumption? Despite the participatory 

rhetoric associated with consumption, significant barriers to entry in 

the marketplace remain. One does not have to buy into the facile distinction between 

electoral politics and consumption, in which the latter is dismissed as trivial 

in comparison with the former, to recognize that it is a relatively narrow socioeconomic 

strata—economically well-off, educated, and predominantly urban—in 

the developing countries that has the capacity and the clout to participate in and, 

even modestly, alter the market conditions to their advantage. Although, “the subsumption 

of production allows consumption to appear as if it were a ‘democratic 

show’—a consumer ‘revolution’ in which all could participate” (Ngai 2003:269), 

consumption alone is, for a variety of reasons, unlikely to prove a panacea for the 

malaise affecting sociopolitical structures in developing countries. 

Without buying into the emancipatory claims about consumption, it is possible 

to recognize the imaginative power of consumption in shaping life trajectories, 

as illustrated by Ngai’s study of rural migrant women who work in China’s burgeoning 

factories. Through a transformation into “desiring machines”(2003:474), 

these women pursue dreams of middle-class lifestyle while simultaneously enabling 

expansion of global capitalism and the state rhetoric aimed at effacing production 

from public discourse (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). 

Moreover, it is by no means inevitable that conditions of rapid cultural change 

and social upheaval leading to disintegration of “traditional” authority will lead to 

new forms of solidarities. What often follows is a reinscription of authority in different 

guises, achieved most commonly through fragmentation of “tradition” and 

its embedding in politicoeconomic circuits of value, which are increasingly transnational 

in scope. The dethroning of socialism as the state ideology in India, economic 

liberalization, and the concomitant rise in Hindu chauvinism reflect a reordering of 

power relations between different segments of society. The resurgence of Swadeshi 

rhetoric and the associated political performative aspects, otherwise paradoxically 

associated with virulent anti-Gandhianism, represents the durability of the widely 

understood metaphor of political protest as public theater. Highly public acts of 675


676 

breaking bottles of Coca-Cola and Pepsi are efforts aimed at countercolonization, 

using the cultural idiom of dishonor and rejection, of discursive space, which is 

otherwise dominated by technoeconomic debates about pesticides, contamination, 

and foreign investment. 

The media coverage of the pesticides controversy also reveals the shifting 

middle-class expectations of the state. The globalization-fueled trajectories of development 

ascendant in many developing countries have in most cases exacerbated 

the existing socioeconomic differences, with one of the outcomes being an intensified 

demand for services traditionally provided by the state. The welfare state, in its 

attenuated form has turned into a mere shadow of itself and is unwilling or unable 

to fulfill its side of the social compact. Thus, there is a move toward privatization 

of security, law enforcement, and provision of basic amenities, such as drinking 

water and electricity. Cities like Mumbai and Delhi have seen gated communities 

sprout, aimed ostensibly at affording their better-off residents higher levels of security 

than what the state is able to provide. Economic changes beginning in the 1990s 

in India ushered sections of its society into a postindustrial bubble, surrounded 

by vast numbers of people living in industrial or even preindustrial conditions. A 

peculiar combination of physical proximity and social distance is starting to emerge 

in cities in developing countries, with the underlying social alienation leading to 

the emergence of gated communities. The socioeconomic power differences, once 

sedimented in caste-based segregated settlements, are now being reinscribed in 

gated communities (Waldrop 2004). 

It would therefore be partial and misleading to ascribe only inclusivity to the 

practice of consumerism. Equally likely is the possibility of consumer choice being 

expressed through esoteric and elitist lifestyle statements, aimed at constructing a 

hierarchy of taste, instead of being exercised in the service of mitigating entrenched 

structural constraints. A similar point is made when, following Bourdieu, Miller 

challenges the liberatory premise of Fair Trade by noting that “purchase of exotic 

foods from different parts of the world is a better sign of new strategies of social exclusion 

than any evidence of empathetic social inclusion” (2001:118). Shoppers may 

become “educated” and even adept in deploying up-to-date rhetoric, but practice 

may remain largely unaffected, a phenomenon much in evidence, as the rampant 

discrepancies between the discourse and the practice of environmentalism show. 

Miller terms the equation of green values and practices to a mere choice of lifestyle 

as the manifestation of “objectification of ethical consumption as a ‘sub-cultural’ 

lifestyle” (2001:129).


Is it possible to yoke commodities and brands with their social moorings, from 

which, it is claimed, they can sometimes get uncoupled? How about the role of 

institutions such as CSE, with their skill in negotiating the bureaucratic and policy 

intricacies of defining public interest? The answer will rest on the ability of these 

institutions to acquire legitimacy despite their eschewing grassroots politics of the 

kind that animates rural environment movements in India. The CSE claims to be 

a watchdog for public interest is rooted in its self-representation as a “think-tank” 

that generates and serves as a clearinghouse for scientific–technical, or “objective,” 

information (Mandavili 2007). The practice of science, in this context, however, 

far from being a disinterested pursuit of truth, is implicated in the hierarchies 

that separate corporations from civil society and consumers. A great deal of the 

corporate rebuttal of CSE findings was based on their challenge of the science 

used in analyzing pesticides in samples of Coca-Cola and Pepsi. The corporations 

therefore trumpeted their claims that “international” labs had vindicated the safety 

of their products. In this charged atmosphere, do the consumers have the ability to 

sift through, organize, and evaluate the technical information contained in the slew 

of accusations and counteraccusations, as was true in the present case study? In fact, 

it could be said that Coca-Cola and Pepsi, by highlighting the lack of accreditation of 

the CSE laboratory and by resorting to unfavorable comparisons with other “reputed 

international labs” succeeded, to a degree, in obfuscating the issue of accountability. 

Thus, consumerism, if it is to redeem its social transformative potential, 

has to be grounded in a reworked state–society relationship. The cornerstone of 

consumerism, the framing of individual choice, in a context in which the state 

is unwilling or unable to provide consumers with ethical alternatives, becomes 

internally contradictory. For the consumer–citizen, the lynchpin of neoliberalism, 

to shoulder its historical burden, it must be “recognize[d] that the formulation of 

subjective intentionality is dialectically conditional upon the externalization of ethics 

in law. Only law and bureaucracy can provide the foundation for the development 

of individualism and choice” (Miller 2001:199). Information and regulation are the 

touchstones for ensuring that consumers make effective political choices through 

their purchases. The fact that the state cannot simply be wished away is recognized 

by the middle class and the media, although grudgingly, and is reflected in the 

contradictory attitudes toward the state. Especially in Third World contexts in 

which regulations are often nonexistent or poorly enforced, a mutually binding and 

beneficial relationship between consumers and the private sector, if unmediated by 

the state, does not appear politically feasible. 

677


678 

The stories that the newspapers told about pesticides in Coca-Cola and Pepsi 

are largly about the promise of consumerism thwarted. But they also agree that far 

from being an incurable condition, it is an aberration, which is, ultimately, remediable 

on its own terms. The romance of brands, that some fear might produce a 

political paralysis, retains its inventory of contradictory impulses with their incendiary 

potential intact. The successful trajectory of the CSE campaign is proof that 

even in the present hegemonic moment the multiple disjunctures that constitute the 

experience of consumerism can generate a charge potent enough for a way forward. 

ABSTRACT 

In India, and elsewhere, the effects of globalization, especially increased consumerism, 

in expanding the circulation of branded goods, has produced a complex mix of responses 

and readings that are often contradictory. In striving to make sense of the apparently 

autonomous and often-dizzying pace of economic and cultural change, media and other 

discourses utilize narratives and strategies that, although located in symbolic–political 

fields, remain contingent in their specific configurations. Coca-Cola and Pepsi as brands 

are hybrid embodiments of the larger dissonances constitutive of the present moment in 

Indian modernity. On the basis of an analysis primarily of media commentary about 

a recent environmental campaign to highlight the presence of pesticides in Coca-Cola 

and Pepsi products, this article charts out the recurring discursive motifs that illustrate 

the political potential and limitations of the evolving sociopolitical fields, encompassing 

such contested categories as the state, multinational corporations, and the consumer, 

and their interrelationships in a globalizing India. 

Keywords: Coca-Cola, Pepsi, consumerism, brand image, India, liberalization, 

environmentalism 

NOTES 

Acknowledgments. I wish to thank the CSE for their assistance with the research of this article. Partial 

funding for this project was provided by a Montclair State University grant, and it is gratefully 

acknowledged. 

1. The opening heading is derived from the article “Of fuzzy laws and fuzzy drinks” (Girimaji 

2003). 

2. In an interview the official in charge of the Coca-Cola–Pepsi campaign at CSE described the 

publicity generated by the revelations as having exceeded their expectations. 

3. Gillespie and Cheesman see middle-class consumerism in aesthetic–cultural terms rather than 

as a political force: “If the cosmopolitanism of middle-class India is consumerist rather than 

political, generated by media and consumerism rather than by political philosophy or ethics, 

what hope is there for the media inspiring alternative political imaginaries?” (2002:129). 

4. The Internet has emerged as the hub for sharing of information related to the activities of 

the MNCs and for networking of activist groups. One such website is for the India Resource 

Center (n.d.), which is a clearinghouse for information about developments pertaining to the 

so-called “Coke-India campaign.”


5. Satish Deshpande (1993:25) has described the transition to neoliberalism as involving replacement 

of the “patriot-producer” of Nehruvian vision with the cosmopolitan “citizen-consumer,” 

with the economic function of consumption having been substituted for production. 

6. An example of the internal conflict between the editorial and marketing policies in mass 

media was provided by the decision of several newspapers to carry full-page advertisements 

by Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the middle of the controversy. The apparent contradiction between 

the editorial and other departments of newspapers was not lost on observers. “The leading 

newspapers carried huge ads from Coke and Pepsi which claimed that their products were safe 

even at a time when the government labs had not given them a clean chit. This move has been 

viewed by certain sections of society as the media failing to live up to its social responsibility” 

(Mitra 2003). 

7. The exact size of the middle class continues to be hotly debated. In fact, the tremendous 

heterogeneity, cultural and economic, of the middle class means that the term middle classes 

is more accurate. There are reports that put the number between 200 and 300 million, on 

the one end, whereas other surveys have produced more modest estimates on the order of 

20–30 million (Sridharan 2004). At issue is the question of the definition of middle class: 

whether a purely economic basis should be used or a combination of social and economic 

indicators. 

8. The term mixed economy in the Indian parlance refers to an economic system whose commanding 

heights—that is the heavy industries—were reserved for the public sector, whereas private 

enterprise was allowed in case of consumer goods, although it was heavily regulated by a system 

of quotas, licenses and tariffs (Rudolph and Rudolph 1987). 

9. Joel Migdal (1988) in his well-known formulation describes it as a subset of the larger problem 

of strong society and weak state. 

10. Minna Saavala (2006) in her study of middle-class youth in Hyderabad finds her subjects to be 

in the grip of anxiety of inclusion and exclusion in the globalized cultural landscape produced 

by forces of neoliberalism. Their sense of being “out of place” is generated by a loss of cultural 

moorings, triggered by the absence of such familiar markers of hierarchy, and affirmations of 

their own superior status, as crowded streets filled with poor people. 

11. The Financial Express in its editorial laid the responsibility for the cola-pesticide controversy 

primarily with the state: “The Pepsis and Cokes of the world would always find ways to wriggle 

out of such controversy due to the pressure on their bottom lines, but the sleeping state needs 

to wake up and should not only set benchmarks but also crack down on the guilty” (2003). 

12. Margin Van Wessel (2001) discusses materialism among the middle class in a small town as a 

feverish pursuit of status, although somewhat stained with moral ambiguity about the associated 

decline in traditional values. It is noteworthy however that the values whose loss is lamented are 

often those that hark back to romanticized notions of the family, village or the community, rather 

than entailing any social critique of the lopsided effects of unbridled consumerism unleashed 

in the name of development. 

13. Mazzarella, in a study of an advertising agency in Mumbai, struggling to come up with an 

appropriate set of images for a local brand of cell phone, notes that “the tension between the 

foreign technology, seen as superior to Indian technology, and the need to indigenize commodity 

images utilizing such technology resulted in the reluctance to localize the imagery” (2003:59). 

The fear being that such localizing will dilute the “world-class” quality of these products. In 

other words, how can you have a product that can be proudly Indian as well as global in its 

orientation when being Indian is perceived as the antithesis of globality, particularly in matter 

of articulating lifestyle choices? 

14. In a commercial released after the findings of pesticides became public, The Coca-Cola Company 

had the male head of a family—portrayed, through his dress, language and demeanor, as an oldfashioned, 

out of touch, and rather uptight husband—refusing Coca-Cola because of qualms 

about quality, only to be berated by his wife, who heaped ridicule on him by challenging 

him if he would go without clothes if someone were to declare them unsafe. She went on to 

declare—erroneously, without doubt—that Coca-Cola products have been given clean chit by 

679


(developed) countries such as the Netherlands and that Coca-Cola is produced by a 200-year-old 

company. 

15. Interestingly, the fact that production and marketing of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in India is undertaken 

by local subsidiaries does not dilute their connotation of being “foreign” brands. 

16. In Pakistan, Naqvi describes “family as the vessel of middle class consumerism” (2005:4318). 

According to him, Coca-Cola is now shifting to a more differentiated strategy of “brand 

association” with youth culture, as opposed to interjecting itself in representations of national 

culture. 

17. In a fit of self-righteous rage, the CEO of PepsiCo India called the controversy a “trial by 

Kangaroo Courts”: “These have been very unfortunate and sad days for our civil society . . . this 

is yet another instance where our democracy and constitutional freedom of speech are being 

used to sensationalize a non-issue.” The crisis, according to the CEO, was not because of the 

absence of standards for beverages, or the presence of pesticides in Pepsi, but because of lack of 

“norms for our society at large and NGOs in particular and the rules of engagement” (Bakshee 

2003). 

18. The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo’s sponsorship of cricket also came under a cloud. An 

article entitled, “Cricket Sponsorship in Jeopardy,” mentioned that “sources in the Board of 

Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and Doordarshan [the state-owned television channel] said 

that if the two companies were implicated for any wrong doing, they might wash their hands 

off Pepsi” (Shukla 2003b). 

19. Even the slogan raised at some of these anti-Coca-Cola–Pepsi demonstrations, “Quit India,” is 

the same as Gandhi’s ultimatum to the British in 1942. “In Mumbai, protestors smashed soft 

drink bottles and demanded a ban on the two brands. ‘Quit India . . . Coke and Pepsi,’ read a 

placard” (Hindustan Times 2003). 

20. In a highly symbolic act, India’s Parliament banned Coca-Cola and Pepsi in its cafeteria, and, 

instead, offered “lassi [buttermilk], coconut water, and lemonade” (Das 2003). The purpose 

was to strip Coca-Cola and Pepsi of the legitimacy of being “quality” products consumed by 

the ruling elite. 

21. The equation of “foreign” with “impure” appears to be a characteristic of culinary classification, 

cross-culturally (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982; Liechty 2005) and, especially, in case of food 

in Indian culture, which is saturated with notions of purity and pollution, therefore, serving 

as a powerful social marker of inclusion as well as exclusion, hierarchy, and status (Appadurai 

1988). 

Editor’s Note: Other Cultural Anthropology articles have also examined the practices and effects 

of MNCs. See, for example, Suzana Sawyer’s “Bobbittizing Texaco: Dis-Membering Corporate 

Capital and Re-Membering the Nation in Ecuador” (2002). Articles that examine middle-class 

formations and practices include Vassos Argyrou’s “ ‘Keep Cyprus Clean’: Littering, Pollution, 

and Otherness” (1997) and Susan A. Reed’s “Performing Respectability: The Beravā, Middle- 

Class Nationalism, and the Classicization of Kandyan Dance in Sri Lanka” (2002). 

REFERENCES CITED 

Agrawal, Anil, and Sunita Narain 

1991 Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmentalism. Delhi: Center 

for Science and Environment. 

Appadurai, Arjun 

1988 How to make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India. Comparative 

Studies in Society and History 30(1):3–24. 

1996 Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Public Worlds, vol. 

1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Applbaum, Kalman 

2000 Crossing Borders: Globalization as Myth and Charter in American Transnational 

Consumer Marketing. American Ethnologist 27(2):257–282. 

680


Argyrou, Vassos 

1997 “Keep Cyprus Clean”: Littering, Pollution, and Otherness. Cultural Anthropology 

12(2):159–178. 

Bakshee, Rajiv 

2003 Trial by Kangaroo Courts. Indian Express, August 15 Electronic document, 

http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/archive full story.php?content 

id=29631, accessed July 10, 2007. 

Baviskar, Amita 

2003 Between Violence and Desire: Space, Power and Identity in the Making of 

Metropolitan Delhi. Oxford, UNESCO: Blackwell. 

Bhattacharya, A. K. 

2003 Losing Trust the MNC Way. Business Standard, August 20. Electronic document, 

http://www.business-standard.com/bsonline/storypage.php?autono=198446 

&leftnm=4, accessed, July 10, 2007. 

Bhushan, Ratna 

2003 Cola Majors Wait and Watch on Damage Control: Studying Options to “Recharge 

Connect” with Consumers. Business Line, August 25. Electronic document, 

http://www.blonnet.com/2003/08/25/stories/2003082501730100.htm, accessed 

July 10, 2007. 

Business Line 

2003a The Majors get back their Fizz. Business Line. August 22. Electronic document, 

http://www.blonnet.com/2003/08/22/stories/2003082202290100.htm, accessed 

July 10, 2007. 

2003b Cola! Cola! Cola! Business Line. Business Line, August 21. Electronic document, 

http://www.blonnet.com/catalyst/2003/08/21/stories/2003082100150400. 

htm, accessed July 10, 2007. 

2003c Will Durga Pujas be hit by Cola Controversy. Business Line. August 13. 

Electronic document, http://www.blonnet.com/2003/08/13/stories/200308 

1301781700.htm, accessed July 10, 2007. 

Business Standard 

2003a No Way to Respond. Business Standard, August 14. Electronic document, 


&leftnm=4, accessed July 10, 2007. 

2003b Pepsi Chief Slams EU Norms. Business Standard, August 13. Electronic document, 

http://www.business-standard.com/bsonline/storypage.php?autono 

=136182&leftnm=1, accessed July 10, 2007. 

2003 c Pepsi India Chief Slams CSE Testing Method. Business Standard, August 

16. 

2003d Not Consumer Raj. Business Standard, August 9. Electronic document, 


&leftnm=4, accessed July 10, 2007. 

Center for Science and Environment (CSE) 

1997 The State of India’s Environment: A Citizen’s Report 4—Dyeing Wisdom: Rise, 

Fall and Potential of India’s Traditional Water Harvesting Systems. New Delhi: 

Center for Science and Environment. 

2003 CSE Study on Pesticide Residues in Soft Drinks: Media Reports, vol. 1: August 

5–31. New Delhi: Center for Science and Environment. 

Chatterjee, Partha 

2004 The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. 

New York: Columbia University Press. 

Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff 

2000 Milennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming. Public Culture 

12(2):291–343. 

681


682 

Das, Arun Kumar 

2003 Colas Out, It’s Lassi for MPty Stomachs. Times of India, August 11. Electronic document, 

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/124730.cms, accessed 

July 10, 2007. 

Deccan Chronicle 

2003 She Is David to the MNC Goliath. Deccan Chronicle, August 17. 

Deshpande, Satish 

1993 Imagined Economies: Styles of Nation-Building in Twentieth Century India. Journal 

of Arts and Ideas 25–26:5–35. 

Douglas, Mary, and Aaron Wildavsky 

1982 Risk and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. 

Economic Times 

2003a It Can Tarnish Our Reputation: Coke. Economic Times, August 6. Electronic document, 

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/115630.cms, accessed 

July 10, 2007. 

2003b Making NGOs Accountable. Economic Times, August 23. Electronic document, 

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/143039.cms, accessed July 

10, 2007. 

Favero, Paolo 

2003 Phantasms in a “Starry” Place: Space and Identification in a Central Delhi Market. 

Cultural Anthropology 18(4):551–584. 

Fernandes, Leela 

2000 a Nationalizing the Global: The Media Images, Cultural Politics and the Middle 

Class in India. Media, Culture, and Society 22(5):611–628. 

2000 b Restructuring the Middle Class in Liberalizing India. Comparative Studies of 

South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 22(1–2):88–112. 

Financial Express 

2003 The Pesticide Cocktail: Coke and Pepsi Need to Come Clean on This. Financial 

Express, August 7. Electronic document, http://www.financialexpress.com/ 

fe archive full story.php?content id=39576, accessed July 10, 2007. 

Financial Times 

2003 Soft Target in India: But the Coke and Pepsi Row is a sign of Brand Strength. 

Financial Times, August 18: 10. 

Gillespie, Marie, and Tom Cheesman 

2002 Media Cultures in India and the South Asian Diaspora. Contemporary South Asia 

11(2):27–33. 

Girimaji, Pushpa 

2003 Of Fuzzy Laws and Fizzy Drinks. Telegraph, August 14. 

Greenough, Paul 

2006 India: A Foreword. In Forging Environmentalism: Justice Environment and Contested 

Environments. Joanne Bauer, ed. Pp. 183–187. New York: M. E. Sharpe. 

Guha, Ramchandra 

1999 Environmentalism: A Global History. New York: Longman. 

Hindu 

2005a Bhopal Tragedy Survivors, Greenpeace Protest in Delhi. Hindu, Dec 3. 

2005b Fugitive Toxic Ship in Indian Waters. Hindu, April 30. 

Hindustan Times 

2003 Demand Grows for Ban on Soft Drink Firms. Hindustan Times, August 8. 

Indian Express 

2003 Coke and Pepsi Dismiss Claim, May Sue NGO. Indian Express, August 6. 

India Resource Center 

N.d. Home Page. Electronic document, http://www.indiaresource.org/, accessed July 

7, 2007.


Khilnani, Sunil 

1997 The Idea of India. New York: Farrar and Giroux. 

Klein, Naomi 

2000 No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. New York: Picador. 

Liechty, Mark 

2005 Carnal Economies: The Commodification of Food and Sex in Kathmandu. Cultural 

Anthropology. 20(1):1–38. 

Mandavili, Apoorva 

2007 A Breath of Fresh Air. Nature 445(7129):706–708. 

Mawdsley, Emma 

2004 India’s Middle Classes and the Environment. Development and Change 35(1):79– 

103. 

Mazzarella, William 

2003 “Very Bombay”: Contending with the Global in and Indian Advertising Agency. 

Cultural Anthropology 18(1):33–71. 

Migdal, Joel S. 

1988 Strong Societies and Weak State: State Society Relations and State Capabilities in 

the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

Miller, Daniel 

1997 Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. New York: Berg. 

2001 The Dialectics of Shopping. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Mitra, Anjan 

2003 The Average Indian be Damned. Pioneer, August 25. 

Naqvi, Tahir 

2005 Cultural Politics of Hope and Coke: Media, Marketing and Citizenship in Pakistan. 

Economic and Political Weekly 40(40): 4316–4320. 

New Indian Express 

2003 Cold Drinks, Hard Facts: Cola Companies Need to Clean Up. New Indian 

Express, August 7. Electronic document, http://www.newindpress.com/ 

newspages.asp?page=f&Title=First+Editorial &aDate=8%2F7%2F2003, accessed 

July 10, 2007. 

Ngai, Pun 

2003 Subsumption or Consumption? The Phantom of Consumer Revolution in “Globalizing” 

China. Cultural Anthropology 18(4):469–482. 

Orlove, Benjamin 

1997 Meat and Strength: The Moral Economy of a Chilean Food Riot. Cultural Anthropology 

12(2):234–268. 

Reed, Susan A. 

2002 Performing Respectability: The Beravā, Middle-Class Nationalism, and the Classicization 

of Kandyan Dance in Sri Lanka. Cultural Anthropology 17(2):246– 

277. 

Rudolph, Lloyd, and Susanne H. Rudolph 

1987 In Pursuit of Laxmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State. Chicago: University 

of Chicago Press. 

Saavala, Minna 

2006 Entangled in the Imagination: New Middle Class Apprehensions in an Indian 

Theme Park. Ethnos 71(3):373–414. 

Sawyer, Suzana 

2002 Bobbittizing Texaco: Dis-Membering Corporate Capital and Re-Membering the 

Nation in Ecuador. Cultural Anthropology 17(2):150–180. 

Shukla, Archana 

2003a Warrior Princess. Economic Times, August 10. Electronic document, http:// 

683


684 

economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/123179.cms, accessed July 10, 

2007. 

2003b Cricket Sponsorship in Jeopardy. Economic Times, August 10. Electronic document, 

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow /123121.cms, accessed 

July 10, 2007. 

Sonwalkar, Prasoon 

2002 “Murdochization” of the Indian Press: From By-Line to Bottom-Line. Media, 

Culture, and Society 24(6):821–834. 

Sridharan, E. 

2004 The Growth and Sectoral Composition of India’s Middle Class: Its Impact on the 

Politics of Economic Liberalization. India Review 3(4):405–428. 

Telegraph 

2003 The Most Valuable Brand in the World Makes No Compromises on the Quality 

of Beverages It Serves Indian Consumers. Telegraph, August 9. 

Varma, Pavan K. 

1998 The Great Indian Middle Class. New Delhi: Penguin. 

Waldrop, Anne 

2004 Gating and Class Relations: The Case of a New Delhi Colony. City and Society 

16(2):93–116. 

Wessel, Margin Van 

2004 Talking about Consumption: How an Indian Middle Class Dissociates from Middle 

Class Life. Cultural Dynamics 16(1):93–116.

PESTICIDES IN COCA-COLA AND PEPSI - Cultural Anthropology

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?