Days after receiving immense backlash on social media for allegedly conducting discrimination after giving into demands of a customer to consult a representative of specific religion, the telecom major Airtel Bharti responded by saying that allegation of prejudice were “untrue and factually incorrect”.

In an official statement titled “Did Airtel really bow down to a discriminatory request?”, the telecom company said that we never have and never will succumb to differentiating on the basis of religion, ethnicity or caste.

Did Airtel really bow down to a discriminatory request? Maybe you should read this. pic.twitter.com/Mr7b8Pgrci

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— airtel India (@airtelindia) June 20, 2018

It all began on June 18, when Bharti Airtel faced the ire of social media users after in a Twitter exchange it had appeared that the telecom giant had catered to a customer’s demand for a non-Muslim customer care executive.

A customer, identified as Pooja Singh from her Twitter handle registered a complaint against Airtel’s customer care support for the company’s DTH service. She alleged that the service engineer “miss behaved” (misbehaved) with her and spoke in an impolite manner.

She was offered assistance by an Airtel executive, who wrote his name, guaranteeing her assistance, to which Singh responded by writing a bigoted comment on his religion.

“Dear Shohaib, as you’re a Muslim and I have no faith in your working ethics because Kuran may have different version for customer service, thus requesting you to assign a Hindu representative for my request. Thanks,” wrote Singh.

Also read | Airtel user asks for Hindu customer support executive; Twitterati fume

The Airtel statement said that the executives were following a dutiful course in their regular work shift and were wrongly targeted for “acceptance of discrimination”. “We did not and we repeat, we DID NOT change the advisor because of the unfathomable request from the said customer”, said Airtel statement.

“That the world was watching and reading into this from a very different lens. The fact that Shoaib wasn’t logged in and that Gaganjot took up the case got read as ‘bowing down to bigotry’. The fact that Gaganjot didn’t check his colleague’s religious identity before taking up the case got read as ‘heeding to a discriminatory request’,” Airtel said in the statement.