On October 11, 2026, Maharashtra's FDA confirmed it had completed personal hearings with Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgn, and Tiger Shroff over a cardamom ad, and announced it was proceeding with the case against them.
The three actors had appeared in a 2024 Vimal Elaichi campaign, a cardamom mouth freshener sold under the tagline 'Bolo Zubaan Kesari.' The product is legal. The brand carrying it is not clean. Vimal Pan Masala, the tobacco-related product that built the Vimal name into a household identity, is banned in Maharashtra. The FDA's argument is simple: advertising anything under the Vimal name in Maharashtra keeps the identity of a prohibited product visible to consumers who already associate 'Vimal' with pan masala, not cardamom.
Surrogate advertising works by keeping a brand alive through a compliant product after the core product is restricted. India's Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act banned direct tobacco advertising, and several pan masala brands responded by launching mouth fresheners, elaichi lines, and soda water under identical brand identities. The product on screen changes. The logo, colour scheme, and celebrity face do not. Maharashtra FDA Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe put the actors' position starkly, calling them violators of law, not just stars.
The transferable lesson is structural, not tactical. When a brand name draws almost all its consumer recognition from a prohibited product's equity, the permitted product cannot operate in regulatory clean air. Every enforcement action against the parent category becomes a crisis for the 'safe' variant. Celebrities recruited on the strength of a compliant product brief find themselves inside a case they cannot separate themselves from, because the brief was never really about cardamom.
A brand that rents its identity from a banned product is not building equity. It is running a clock.
Related reading: When Food Safety Threatens Brand Reputation · Worms Were Found in Cadbury Chocolate in 2003. Amitabh Bachchan Saved the Brand, Not the Packaging Fix · What Patanjali Taught Every Brand Manager About the Power and the Danger, of a Founder’s Face
(Verify facts here: thestatesman.com, storyboard18.com, business-standard.com, deccanherald.com)
