SRK, Ajay Devgn And Tiger Shroff Get An FDA Notice: What The Vimal Elaichi Row Means, And What The Law Says

Three of Bollywood's biggest stars are facing regulatory heat over an advertisement they shot together two years ago. The Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued show-cause notices to Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgn and Tiger Shroff over their 2024 campaign for Vimal Elaichi, alleging the ad amounts to surrogate advertising for Vimal Pan Masala, a tobacco-linked product banned in the state. The notices, dated August 11, became public this week, with delivery confirmed at Shah Rukh Khan's Bandra residence Mannat, Ajay Devgn's home in Juhu, and Tiger Shroff's production company.

The action places three of the industry's most recognisable faces back at the centre of a long-running debate over celebrity endorsements, surrogate advertising, and how far India's food safety law actually reaches when a product's name does double duty for two very different things.

What exactly does the FDA notice say?

According to a report in Indiablooms, the nine-page notice was issued by Maharashtra Food Safety Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe and states that the Vimal Elaichi advertisement "prima facie" appears to promote the Vimal brand, which the FDA says is primarily associated with pan masala.

The notice directs all three actors to immediately discontinue their participation in the campaign and remove any related promotional material from their official social media accounts, and seeks a formal explanation for their involvement.

Why is Vimal Elaichi under the scanner?

The controversy centres on a 2024 advertisement in which Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgn and Tiger Shroff appeared together to endorse Vimal Elaichi, a cardamom product. The FDA's objection is that the Vimal name is mainly known in the market for Vimal Pan Masala, a gutkha-adjacent tobacco product whose sale is banned in Maharashtra.

The action forms part of the state FDA's broader crackdown on pan masala and gutkha products containing tobacco or nicotine, rather than being an isolated case against these three actors alone.

What does the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 actually say?

The FSS Act, 2006 is India's primary food-safety law, and Section 24(1) of the Act prohibits misleading or deceptive advertisements used to promote the sale, supply or consumption of food articles through unfair trade practices, according to a LiveLaw analysis of the provision. The law states that anyone who publishes, or is involved in broadcasting, an advertisement that falsely describes a food product, or is likely to mislead as to its nature, substance or quality, or offers a false guarantee, is liable to a penalty of up to ₹10 lakh.

The Act is supplemented by the Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018, which lay down more detailed rules on permissible claims. Notably, as flagged in a NAPi policy review, the law does not offer an objective, food-specific definition of what counts as "misleading," leaving that determination to case-by-case interpretation by regulators.

What counts as surrogate advertising?

Surrogate advertising refers to promoting a brand extension of a product that is banned or restricted from direct advertising, typically by advertising a related, permitted product under the same brand name. The practice took root in India in the mid-1990s after the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act barred direct tobacco and liquor advertising, prompting companies to market allied products, such as elaichi or soda, instead.

The Central Consumer Protection Authority's 2022 guidelines on misleading advertisements explicitly prohibit surrogate advertising, and separate 2017 guidelines from the Advertising Standards Council of India place the responsibility on endorsing celebrities to check that an ad is not deceptive before agreeing to feature in it.

Have these actors faced this kind of scrutiny before?

This is far from the first brush with controversy over such endorsements. Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgn and Akshay Kumar were earlier issued central government notices after a public interest litigation in the Allahabad High Court sought to have their Padma awards reviewed and fines imposed over similar elaichi campaigns tied to tobacco brands, according to Gulf News.

Akshay Kumar subsequently apologised publicly and said he would stay away from such advertisements, while Devgn defended his continued association with the brand as a personal choice, insisting at the time that he had endorsed the elaichi product and not any tobacco item.

What penalties or consequences could the actors now face?

Under the FSS Act's Section 24, the actors could face a penalty of up to ₹10 lakh if found to have knowingly participated in a misleading food advertisement, though a full parliamentary push in 2016 for jail terms of up to five years and fines of ₹50 lakh for celebrity endorsers of misleading ads was never enacted into the current framework.

In the immediate term, the FDA notice requires the actors to stop featuring in the campaign and pull associated posts from their social media, with further regulatory or legal steps possible depending on how they respond to the show-cause notice.

As of this report, none of the three actors' representatives had issued a public response to the notice. Given how often elaichi endorsements by top Bollywood names have drawn similar scrutiny over the past decade, the outcome of this case is likely to be watched closely as a test of how strictly Maharashtra's food safety authorities are willing to enforce the surrogate-advertising provisions of the FSS Act against India's most bankable celebrity endorsers.