Toronto: The Toronto Star (TS), Canada’s leading newspaper faced huge protests outside its building office recently. The Hindu community in Toronto had staged a campaign. The reason? The paper had published an image of an unfinished 'nude' Goddess Durga (Indian deity representing courage) on the auspicious day of Durga Puja on October 4, 2003.

This picture prominently appeared on one third of the printed page in the religion section, and was made bigger than the article itself. TS selected and published this "nude" picture by ignoring many "dressed & decent Durga" pictures available from Reuters that time.

'IndiaCause', a web portal, objected to this event and communicated with the TS management, Attorney General of Canada, Human Rights Commission and other leading Canadian agencies.

After failing to receive any response from the TS management (and other agencies) IndiaCause launched an online protect. The protest web page received about 9,000 hits on the first day. Toronto Star received about 1,000 to 2,000 protest emails in first few hours of this campaign.

Within few hours after the campaign started, TS replied to protests, "We're sorry if this representation of the goddess offended some readers. It was unintentional."

But the organisation, IndiaCause was not satisfied with this "half-hearted explanation". The action continued.

The Indian community in Toronto arranged a major demonstration outside 'Toronto Star' building on October 18, 2003. TS reported about this demonstration, but still refused to apologize. The Indians were enraged. A second and the bigger demonstration took place before the TS building on November 1, 2003. Community representatives met with TS publisher John Honderich.

Finally, a fortnight later, the paper published an unconditional apology along with an appropriate Durga image, in the same section where the initial nude Durga image was published.