The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) gets more than 40,000 requests for issuing new stamps to highlight various issues and ends up accepting about 25. Last year, the agency issued a Diwali stamp, making the occasion special for the Indian-American community, which had campaigned for it for more than two decades.
“We started celebrations last year and it continues. Diwali is brighter than earlier, and more charming,” said Ranju Batra, the New York-based community activist and chair, Diwali Stamp Project, who relentlessly pursued the goal for six years. She entered the scene in 2010 after several previous efforts had fizzled out.
By 2016, the campaign had grown beyond being just a demand from Indian Americans. “Every Hindu, every Indian living anywhere in the world is proud of the stamp. But it is not about the celebration of a religion or even of the nation. It is about universal values of inclusiveness,” she said, recalling the campaign that was supported by people from multiple ethnic origins and religious backgrounds. The breakthrough came in 2013, when, accompanied by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney, she met senior officials of the USPS.
From online to paper
She recalls complaining to the officials that there had been no response at all, despite the large number of online signatures. “You are asking USPS for a new postage stamp. You have to remember that postage stamp does not go on emails,” an official reportedly told them.
“That day we gave up the online campaign and turned to paper petitions,” she said. “That evening I sat on my computer, drafting several versions of the petition. I also included images of different stamps for other festivals already issued by the USPS and pleaded that now is time for the Diwali stamp.”
Ms. Batra would carry hundreds of paper petitions wherever she went — to grocery shops, to salons — and urge people to sign. In some cases, she would request friends to aggregate petitions from others. And she collected all of them together and posted to USPS.
In 2014 — fourth year into her campaign — she received a notification from the USPS that the proposal was under consideration, followed by another spell of silence. In March 2016, she received the exciting news, but with a caveat that she had to keep it a secret until August 23rd, when the USPS would officially announce it.
In another first, the USPS also asked her to sell the stamp on its behalf. It took her a while to complete the paper work — in which she was aided by her lawyer-husband Ravi Batra — as this had never been done before.
Record sales
However, once the sale was announced, it opened the floodgates of demand. Five people, including Ms. Batra herself, ordered stamps worth $10,000. “Many ordered for $1,000-$2,000. Many sent checks of $9.40, the price of a pack of twenty stamps. And the sale turned out to be a much more tedious than the campaign,” she chuckled.
On day one, the campaign sold stamps worth $1,70,000, breaking all records of first-day sale. “Thousands were sold by USPS on its own — information that they have not shared,” she said. Ms. Batra has sought numbers for sales in the last one year, but USPS has not released it yet.
