Interestingly, by strange coincidence, our protest started on January 26 (India's Republic day) and we got the apology for Gandhi bashing on January 30 (Gandhi death anniversary).

The sequence of events:

IndiaCause launched protest on January 26 asking for an unconditional apology from Maxim. First 3 days Maxim received 5000-6000 protest mails. Maxim refused to make even a single comment at the end of the third day.

On January 28, we changed our target from Maxim to 'Corporate advertisers' (Honda, Toyota, Subaru, Nike, Unilever, Miller, Core). This was the turning point and the deciding factor!

After first 50-100 emails to 'Corporate advertisers', Maxim PR Firm came out with statement "We shall respond in May for Happy Resolution (but no 'apology')"

On 29th IndiaCause site replied "You have insulted a nation of 1 billion people. If you are going to take three months to write 3 lines apology, you are insulting us further. We can not change the appeal made on Jan 28, until the apology is published or conveyed formally."

After 500-600 mails to Corporates, Maxim PR contacted and sent in an email apology. We insisted for 'Signed Paper Document', which they sent in immediately the next day. They wanted to resolve this issue at the earliest. This apology is addressed specifically to IndiaCause.

IndiaCause members have made the difference every time there was a 'Call For Action'. The only difference this time was "The Campaign went on and succeeded under the media focus" (Indian media must be given equal credit).

Hindustan Times reported:
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Maxim vacillated a great deal before coming out with the apology. What seemed to have finally worked was a threat by IndiaCause, the US-based activist group, to approach advertisers with appeals to stop giving ads to a publication that has "insulted the apostle of peace". It even put out a sample letter to corporate heads on its website

For IndiaCause, which has spearheaded many protests of the kind, extracting the apology from Maxim was a major success. Maxim's initial stance was it will address the controversy in its May issue, prompting the Indian group to retort: "If you are going to take three months to write a three-line apology, you are insulting us further."
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Our protest page received 24,591 hits in first six days while the protest was on. 7000+ may have sent in their protest. Thanks again for your great support!

At the end of this campaign we are a strong team of 6700+ Cyber Activists. If ever we can be a team of 1,00,000+ we can change the way our 'Corrupt, Demoralized and Criminalized' India works (Too big a dream for IndiaCause as of today).

We are going to send the copy of this apology to all the global media. They are intelligent enough to understand the message behind that.

Credit of the following 'Maxim Apology' goes to many, many known and unknown, individual citizens and groups from several countries. The image of apology document is available here :

http://www.indiacause.com/C17_Maxim_Gandhi.htm 

Here is our media page full of reports, credites to IndiaCause - http://indiacause.com/IC_Media_Coverage.htm 

We are receiving very high volume of emails. Hope to reply most of them in a week or so.

Thanks to many for sending the Kannada and Malayalam translation.

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