Rio heroes Sindhu and Sakshi arrested!” Or how about this? “Amitabh, Shah Rukh booked; may face two years in jail, 5mn fine.”
If India’s lawmakers, in earnest collusion with bureaucrats, had their way, these could well be the headlines in national newspapers in the not-too-distant future.
No, I am not scaremongering.
The Narendra Modi government last week accepted the recommendations of a parliamentary panel to impose stringent accountability for endorsing products and for making “misleading” advertisement with the intention of enticing consumers.
Section 17 of the Consumer Protection Bill defines “endorsement” as “any message, verbal statement or any other form of depiction to show a celebrity’s likeness” (sic) for a product, which “leads the consumer to believe that it reflects the celebrity’s opinion, finding or experience.”
The Consumer Affairs Ministry approved the parliamentary panel’s proposed amendments, following which the Law Ministry has given its nod. Only a cabinet approval, most likely a given, is awaited. This can happen as early as this week or next.
So imagine this scenario once the new bill becomes law: A fairness cream producing company approaches matinee idol Shah Rukh Khan for endorsement. It offers him a fat paycheque for promoting its product for one year. But Khan is aware of the law and, therefore, tells the company: “Sorry guys, let me first use the product for a year and then I will endorse it. Leave enough stock here and you come back this time next year.”
Even if the company were to wait for a year and go back to Shah Rukh, there could be another problem because in these kinds of things what is sauce for the goose need not necessarily be sauce for the gander.
Imagine Khan using the product every day without fail for one year and finding that his skin has really started to glow. He would happily accept the cheque from the company and tell the world that he found the product highly efficient.
But John Doe smears it all over his face and comes down with boils and what have you. He goes to court and Khan is awarded a jail term because his endorsement had misled the consumer.
Even if he wanted to—which obviously he doesn’t—India’s super hero Rajanikanth cannot advertise for a product that promises to rejuvenate hair on the scalp. As per the new law, Rajanikanth will first have to get all that hair back on his pate before posing for photos of the product. Sorry, no wigs please.
Sachin Tendulkar has scored a hundred hundreds in tests and one-day matches combined. His bat had been the scourge of bowlers the world over. But if he were to promote a cricket bat and someone in interior Uttar Pradesh failed to score, the new law could come in handy for the chap to haul the batting maestro to court.
Substitute Sindhu for Tendulkar and a badminton racquet for the cricket bat and you will get the result mentioned at the beginning. Remember, you read the headline first in this column!
Section 75B of the new Bill seeks to make any “false or misleading” endorsement which is “prejudicial to the interest of any consumer” a penal offence, punishable with a jail term of up to two years and a fine of Rs1mn for the first such offence, and imprisonment of five years along with a fine of Rs5mn for the second and subsequent offences. The words within quotes, as you can see, are open to interpretations that can vary from court to court and state to state. Lawyers are going to have a field day for sure. And the Supreme Court, where everything will eventually get decided, can look forward to adding to its pile of backlogs.
The parliamentarians involved in framing the new law have obviously been advised by bureaucrats who have simply tried to pass the buck by dragging celebrities into the fray. There are so many licensing authorities that look after consumer products, be it food, fashion, health and beauty, automobiles or mobile phones. Officials manning these bodies are supposed to issue licences after fully satisfying themselves with the genuineness of the product. If the product does not match up to the manufacturer’s claim, then it should not be allowed to be sold. But officialdom does not want to take that responsibility, so it has managed to get parliamentarians to move the blame to celebrities. In short, shoot the messenger.
There is more. To keep adding to their tribe, the officials have also managed to introduce yet another body in the form of the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) which, according to the new Bill, will fill “an institutional void in the regulatory regime extant.” What this means is there will be one more office—and several officials—to be approached if a manufacturer wants to launch a product. If Prime Minister Modi thinks that he will have minimum government and maximum governance, he has another think coming!
Now here’s something ponder. When a chief secretary or a chief minister or even the Prime Minister inaugurates a bridge or a flyover or even flags off a new train, is he not endorsing that product? And what if that bridge/flyover collapses or that train derails? Who will be responsible? Can we sue these worthies for selling us a bad product?
Better still, come election time, most politicos get film and sports stars to campaign for them. Naturally, this has to be seen as endorsement by the stars. Now, if the candidate thus endorsed is defeated, can the star be sued by the voter who, after all, is a consumer in a wider sense? And even if the candidate wins but does not live up to the promises made during the campaign, then can the star be taken to court? Possibilities are endless. And so are the chances of misuse of the law.
Partisan speakers
Satbir Singh Kadian of Haryana has got one for the record books. Now, since this is the Olympics season when the papers are full of the exploits of athletes from across the world (not from India though), you may want to believe that Kadian has accomplished something that his compatriots had failed to do in Rio de Janeiro. No, nothing of that sort. Kadian has been jailed for corruption.
Curious fact is Kadian is a former speaker of the Haryana Assembly, the first to be jailed after reaching that high position. Kadian presided over the state assembly when the Indian National Lok Dal (INLD) under the leadership of Om Prakash Chautala was in power. The two will make a nice pair behind bars as Chautala himself has been put away for 10 years for corruption in a different case.
Looks like this is a bad time for speakers in general. At least two incumbent speakers are facing flak for their somewhat undemocratic moves.
Take Tamil Nadu, for instance. Speaker P Dhanapal banned the entire DMK opposition for a week after that party protested the remarks of one of the ruling AIADMK members in the assembly criticising opposition leader M K Stalin.
Something similar happened in the Gujarat Assembly where Speaker Ramanlal Vora ordered eviction of as many as 50 Congress MLAs after they disrupted the house demanding a discussion on the assault on Dalits by cow vigilantes.
In the Delhi Assembly confrontations between the Speaker Ram Niwas Goel and the three-member BJP opposition is a regular sight. Goel had resorted to evicting this nominal opposition more than once.
Goes without saying that Dhanapal, Vora and Goel belong to the ruling party and it is their majority status that had helped them to the elevated status.
But once elected to the position of the Speaker, these honourable men are required to forget their party affiliations and act impartially. For long that has been the norm and custom. But with politics becoming more and more narrow and mean-minded, presiding officers in legislatures are also getting sucked into the battle.
The speaker is endowed with vast powers that are beyond the scope of legal challenge. So it is all the more important that these powers are used with utmost caution with the sole interest being furthering democratic traditions.
Somnath Chatterjee as Lok Sabha Speaker was one who conducted the proceedings of the house without letting an iota of his Marxist leanings show.
The present incumbent Sumitra Mahajan has been credited with taking the opposition with her although her ruling accepting the Aadhar Bill as a money bill in the budget session did invite some raised eyebrows.