NEW DELHI – For two years Salman Khan has spent more time in courtrooms and behind security cordons than on a film set, and on Friday morning the latest of his legal headaches eased a little, in the unglamorous setting of a consumer dispute over a packet of pan masala.
The National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission has stayed an order by a Jaipur district commission that wanted a forensic examination of the actor’s signature, and frozen the bailable warrants issued alongside it, in a case accusing him of fronting a misleading advertisement. The bench of NCDRC president Justice (retired) AP Sahi and member Bharatkumar Pandya passed the order on June 10 and listed the matter again for June 22.
The packet at the centre of it is Rajshree Pan Masala, and the question the case keeps circling is one that has shadowed Indian advertising for a generation. Was the star selling elaichi, the silver-coated cardamom the brand puts on its label, or was he lending his face to a product family that also sells the chewable tobacco the cardamom is so often a cover for. Khan has been firm on his answer. When the row first broke late last year, he said he had endorsed only cardamom and not gutkha, the standard defence of every celebrity who has ever taken a surrogate-advertising cheque.
The complaint that started it was filed in December by Yogendra Singh Badiyal and another consumer before the district commission in Jaipur, numbered 879 of 2025. It argued that the advertisement was deceptive. Where the matter took an unusual turn was the commission’s decision to order a forensic test of Khan’s signature on a power of attorney filed in the proceedings, and then to issue bailable warrants when his appearance did not follow.
It is that escalation the NCDRC has now halted. According to LiveLaw, the commission directed that further proceedings before the district commission remain stayed and called for the original case records to be produced before it, language that suggests the higher body wants to look at how a consumer complaint ended up ordering handwriting forensics on a film star.
For Khan the relief is narrow and procedural. The warrants are frozen, not quashed; the complaint is paused, not dismissed; and the forensic question that triggered the whole sequence is parked until the bench reconvenes. What the order buys him is time, and an absence of the photograph that every one of these hearings threatens to produce, of one of Hindi cinema’s biggest names answering a summons over a sachet.
The timing is its own kind of pressure. Khan is the spine of the Yash Raj spy universe, and a teaser dropped this month handed that franchise to a new generation, with the studio leaning on the world he, Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan built. Off screen his name keeps surfacing in darker contexts, most recently in the Lawrence Bishnoi gang’s claim of a shooting outside a Delhi gym, where the threat was again framed around proximity to him. A consumer case over cardamom is, by the standards of his recent years, almost a relief.
Surrogate advertising is the gap the case lives in. India bans the direct advertising of tobacco and gutkha, so manufacturers register a benign cousin, cardamom, mineral water, music, and advertise that instead, trusting the consumer to make the connection the law forbids them to spell out. Stars have been signing those deals for decades, and the regulatory response has been episodic at best. What is unusual here is not the endorsement but that an ordinary consumer complaint reached the point of demanding a handwriting expert.
Khan is not the only face the original complaint named, and the question the proceedings raise extends well past him. India Today reported in November that he had distanced himself from the product, insisting the cardamom was all he sold. Whether a celebrity can be held to account for what a brand’s sister product contains, when he has signed only for the version the law allows, is the argument waiting underneath the procedure.
None of that gets settled on June 22. The bench will decide first whether the forensic order survives at all, and only then whether the complaint goes forward. For now the most famous signature in the case stays untested, and the question of what exactly Salman Khan was selling stays exactly where it has sat for a generation of Indian advertising, unanswered and profitable.
