A day after RSS removed his name as a speaker, Accenture Managing Director Rama S Ramachandran said that he had never agreed to attend the event — ‘Resurgent Bharath’ — which is scheduled to take place in Chennai on February 2. “I am not sure how this misunderstanding happened, but I have no affiliation with this group and never agreed to speak at or attend this event,” he said in a tweet.

His clarification came after some social media users shared the RSS poster and questioned the participation of a senior Accenture official in a religious event. A twitter user by name of Sidrah tagged Accenture and asked: “Could you please explain why is your India MD at a religious function organized by RSS.” The poster, which is doing rounds on social media, has the name of Anirudha Deshpande, chief of All India Public Outreach-RSS, as a keynote speaker at the event. Apart from Deshpande, Zoho Corporation Founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu and Accenture Solutions MD and Head Rama S Ramachandran also featured in the poster as the chief guest and guest of honour respectively. According to a report in PTI, RSS has removed Ramachandran’s name from the invite.

While Ramachandran has denied that he ever agreed to participate in the event, Vembu has responded very aggressively to the attacks on social media and said: “I don’t decide my views based on Twitter attacks. If you dislike which events I attend, please do what your conscience dictates and I will do what mine dictates. We earn our daily bread due to our work and we will continue to do quality work. I won’t be responding to attacks.”

Vembu’s remarks have, however, not gone down well with a section of people who have now started a campaign to boycott Zoho. While some tweeted against Venbhu, some were in favour of Zoho CEO. For instance, Dennis Paul M, a tweeter user, writes: “CEOs are humans who’re free to have their own political opinion, in a free world. Shun the losers who threaten a boycott of a company’s products because of it’s CEO’s political opinion.”