Celebrities continue to court legal trouble by lending their names to banned products with the latest crackdown illustrating how the entertainment industry remains willing to take calculated risks despite well-documented penalties. Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgn and Tiger Shroff found themselves entangled in a regulatory enforcement action with a show-cause notice when Maharashtra’s food safety authority identified their roles in promoting pan masala under the guise of an elaichi (cardamom) advertisement in 2024. The show-cause notice demands not only that the trio abandon the campaign immediately but also scrub all traces of the promotion from their digital presence. The stakes are substantial: endorsers face potential fines of Rs 10 lakh to Rs 50 lakh and career restrictions that could prevent them from endorsing products for up to three years. What makes this case particularly striking is that it represents a recurring cycle – Akshay Kumar previously confronted similar controversies in 2022 after promoting the same brand alongside Shah Rukh and Ajay, suggesting that neither regulatory warnings nor public backlash have fundamentally altered industry practices around prohibited product endorsements.
