As UP revives eateries order, Congress takes a stand for sanity

On September 24, the Uttar Pradesh government reintroduced by a back door an order expressly quashed by the Supreme Court, making it necessary under the guise of policing food hygiene for establishments serving food to display the names and addresses of their owners and managers. This has been done in the name of invoking statewide Section 56 of the Food Safety Standards Act (FSSA) 2006.

The measure cocks a snook at the top court’s July 22 order which had said that the order passed in Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh requiring establishments sited along the route of the Kanwar Yatra to prominently display on the outside the names of the owners. It was an unsubtle attempt to single out Muslim restaurateurs as some of the rhetoric then employed made clear. "They [Muslims] write names like Vaishno Dhaba Bhandar, Shakumbhari Devi Bhojanalaya, and Shuddh Bhojanalaya and sell non-vegetarian food," Uttar Pradesh minister Kapil Dev Aggarwal had then said.

The FSSA is concerned with maintaining food standards and hygiene and prescribing penalties for not maintaining these. Section 56 of the FSSA says, ‘Any person who, whether by himself or by any other person on his behalf, manufactures or processes any article of food for human consumption under unhygienic or unsanitary conditions, shall be liable to a penalty which may extend to one lakh rupees.’

It has been reported that acting against those who are not compliant entails a ‘verification process’. Since a top court order against the display of names exists and the FSSA does not provide for it, the Uttar Pradesh government is free to pursue normal processes of verification practised thus far in the state and practised elsewhere. It does appear that Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and his government’s actions are in bad faith and ultra vires, not possessing legal sanction or authority. Steps must be taken to show these petty tyrants the extent of their powers.

But Uttar Pradesh has revelled in undermining the very rule of law it has been tasked to protect in several arenas for the past seven years. What came as a surprise was that the Congress government in Himachal Pradesh seemed to issue an order the very next day (September 25) making it mandatory for restaurants, fast food outlets, and mobile vendors to do likewise.

Urban Development Minister Vikramaditya Singh trotted out the same specious arguments — that providers of cooked food must be accountable for hygiene and quality, and the display of names would make it easier for the authorities to track providers and implement rules efficiently. Is it the case, one may ask, that in the absence of draconian targeting, India has been swamped by a flood of prepared food that is substandard and unhygienic?

We are not privy to what was going through Singh’s mind, who reportedly has bigger ambitions in state politics, being the son of the former chief minister late Virbhadra Singh, but he was smacked down the next day with little ceremony.

The state ministry disavowed the move, saying no such decision had been taken, while it was reported that Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had been embarrassed and had sent out a warning to Singh against making remarks on sensitive issues.

The Congress didn’t leave anything to chance. On September 28, the party leadership sent out a strong message, with senior party leader K C Venugopal meeting Singh in New Delhi and reminding him about the party’s policies and ideology. It was reported that Singh claimed he had been misquoted, which essentially amounted to an apology.

The alacrity with which the Congress declared its commitment to the politics of inclusion and against the harassment of minorities stands out. This is a new Congress, it appears, that is confidently secular, multicultural, and opposed to the politics of dog-whistling divisiveness.

Many setbacks and its marginalisation in national politics encouraged some sections of the leadership to pursue a course of ‘soft Hindutva’, though the concept itself is inexplicable. The ideology of Hindutva, with its majoritarian, muscular, and proto-fascist core, is hardly amenable to softening.

A holistic approach to politics, driven by material issues, which has produced electoral results, has given the Congress the confidence to provide the lead in fighting the Bharatiya Janata Party’s incessantly toxic tropes. Other members of the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A.) would do well to unashamedly help protect this space.

(Suhit K Sen is author of ‘The Paradox of Populism: The Indira Gandhi Years, 1966-1977’.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.