Indian designers using Pakistani moles to promote them

Pakistan`s fashion design industry has seen increasing success and has grown in all spheres. The cauldron had been bubbling for some time and the Indian lobbyists were bound to feel the pressure and retaliate at some point.
When jewellery designer Sara Taseer Shoaib (STS) started making waves internationally and servicing a host of Indian clientele, things boiled over.

Sara has been written about in a host of International magazines and had shows in the Four Seasons and Harvey Nichols. As a result, a stream of attacks and poisonous gossip was released as an attempt to undermine her success.

Famous relatives: Farah Khan, an Indian designer who promotes her jewellery through her famous relatives, began to lose Pakistani and Indian clients to STS. Therefore, paid Pakistani moles were chosen to promote Indian designers at the expense of Pakistanis. As a result, a rogue website was paid to malign Pakistani artist STS.

Maligned: A local English daily gave the Indian designer half page coverage and maligned their homegrown artist, Sara.

Indian media is a promotion machine for India. It has successfully created an image of a moderate and creative India via promotion of Bollywood and pageants like Miss World. Indian stars and even mediocre designers are launched to promote India as an upcoming nation comparable to China. The Indians have tried to disassociate themselves with Pakistan.

Indians under threat: With the boom of the media industry in Pakistan the Indians are under threat. The Pakistani market is huge and untapped. The Indians are feeling insecure and want to crush it before it can grow into a formidable force. To do this they have paid magazines, websites and newspapers to slander upcoming artists.

This is shameful. Pakistani fashion journalists should be playing a positive role and use all their forces to back up its creative industry. Instead, local dailies are carrying planted articles maligning the one jewellery designer who is making waves in New York, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Dubai market: Sara is exploring the Dubai market where high profile Indians and Pakistanis are becoming her clients. This is a direct threat to Indian businessmen. Sara`s success should be promoted in a positive light, instead of people maliciously putting her down.

A photographer by the fictitious name of Aly Mason has spearheaded this campaign.

Hacking Facebook: After hacking Sara`s Facebook page which is an easy target where anyone can upload an image, he started a hate campaign against the designer who happens to be from a prominent political family. A local daily used damaging words in red ink like heist. Heist refers to a theft. There was no evidence or photograph of any plagiarism.

Sketch: There was only a sketch made by Aly Mason with Miss Taseer`s signature lifted from her logo. There is a stamp of Farah Khan present on the sketch. Anyone with Photoshop experience can do that. There is no proof of STS` plagiarism.

Sara has a website and no familiar designs are on it.

Issue ignored: Furthermore, hundreds of Indian and Pakistani jewellery shops are full of designs similar to large houses like Cartier and Chopard. Nobody has picked up on this as an issue. These design houses are massive. Indian jewellery designers are not anywhere on the International scene. Because Sara is prominent both in her work and her aggressive marketing and promotion strategies, she has been targeted and wrongly accused. *