It won’t be perhaps an exaggeration to say that 90 percent of advertisements broadcast and published in India are misleading in one way or another. An advertisement of women’s Horlics featuring Taapsee Pannu claims that drinking this beverage strengthens the bones of women over 30 since women start losing bone density after 30. The advertising world is full of millions of such misleading advertisements regarding exaggerated and often outrightly false claims of the supposed health benefits of certain food products – consuming Saffola refined oil will keep your cholesterol in check, consuming breakfast cereals will supply you with all the essential vitamins and minerals needed for the healthy functioning of your body, consuming such and such biscuits will enhance your nutrition levels, consumption of diet coke will help you cut on unwanted calories, etc.
Many of these advertisements cook up fictitious information and present them as facts, even featuring an actor posing as a doctor verifying these “facts” authoritatively! Remember the Sensodyne toothpaste advert featuring a “doctor” talking about the supposed superiority of the composition of Sensodyne toothpaste over other brands? Yet, none of these companies responsible for creating such misleading advertisements have ever been issued a notice by the Supreme Court of Bharat.
Bharat’s food regulator FSSAI takes stock of these misleading advertisements and issues notice to the concerned stakeholders. But I don’t recall any incident where the Supreme Court has reprimanded a major brand for creating adverts of non-medical food products with dubious claims of curing medical ailments and diseases. That’s probably because people don’t generally go around filing petitions against these advertisements. However, based on a petition filed by the Indian Medical Association (IMA), the Supreme Court has come down heavily on Patanjali Ayurved over “misleading advertisements” and banned the company from advertising any product related to diseases or other medical conditions.
The apex court observed that Patanjali cannot claim that its medicines can treat ailments specified in the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act. The Supreme Court has also issued Contempt of Court notices to Yog Guru Baba Ramdev, the founder of Patanjali Ayurved, and Acharya Balkrishna, the co-founder of the company. The apex court had warned Patanjali in November 2023 that if it continued advertising its medicines with false claims, the court would slap a fine of INR 1 crore (1,20,000 USD) per false claim on the company.
“You (Patanjali Ayurved) had the courage to come up with this advertisement after the order of this court! Permanent relief… what do you mean by permanent relief? Is it a cure? You can’t say your medicines/drugs cure a particular disease”, the court reprimanded Patanjali. “How can Patanjali claim to completely cure blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, asthma, and obesity”? the court said further. The bench of Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah was hearing the petition filed by the Indian Medical Association against an alleged smear campaign by Baba Ramdev against COVID 19 medicines and the Allopathy system of medicine.
Firstly, with all due respect to the honorable apex court, the kind of language the Supreme Court of Bharat is using for Patanjali seems rather bizarre. The apex court is treating Patanjali Ayurved, a company nurturing and protecting the Ayurvedic system of medicine in which crores of Bharatiyas have put their faith in, like an ordinary criminal. I don’t keep track of Patanjali’s advertisements but even if they have advertised certain medicines saying that these medicines can provide permanent relief from blood pressure, diabetes, etc., is it that big an offense? Nothing is foolproof. Plenty of people on permanent high blood pressure allopathic medications can still have their BP shooting beyond a particular point, the medications notwithstanding. The allopathic doctors themselves say that BP medicines can just control the BP as long as these are being taken and not cured it.
During coronavirus, the allopathic system of medicine could not find any treatment as such. Therefore, most hospital treatment consisted of a series of hits and trials. Also, with regard to the corona vaccines, many people contracted corona again and again even after getting vaccinated. Thus, that wasn’t foolproof either. If someone with mild coronavirus has faith in Patanjali’s medicines and is getting cured with those, why on earth does the IMA have an issue? Crores of people in Bharat prefer the Ayurvedic system of medicine when it comes to non-emergency long-term healthcare. There are millions of testimonies of people getting rid of chronic arthritis, blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, etc. with the help of Patanjali Ayurved’s medicines, their prescribed yoga asanas, and a healthy lifestyle rooted in the ancient science of Ayurveda. How can the Supreme Court of Bharat ignore the vast corpus of literature on Ayurveda and the testimonies of people who got cured through Patanjali Ayurved and rely solely on what the IMA thinks and says to pass its verdict.
The Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisement) Act based on which the apex court passed its judgment against Patanjali was passed in 1954. It’s an archaic law that hasn’t been updated till now. The act prohibits advertisements of certain drugs for the treatment of certain diseases and disorders. It prohibits advertisements of medicines for curing menstrual ailments, infertility in women, diabetes, cancer, epilepsy, obesity, leprosy, pneumonia, etc. It’s a rather long list of diseases that can be accessed from the internet.
Supreme Court Lawyer and legal activist Ashiwini Uppadhyay explains the context of the Supreme Court judgment against Patanjali lucidly in an interview he gave to Capital TV, the video of which is available on YouTube. He says that The Drugs and Magic Remedies Act is based on the colonial system because at that time, the allopathy system of medicine had no cure for diseases mentioned in the Act. Therefore, under the influence of its former colonial power and the international pharma lobby, Bharat passed a law that prohibited anyone from advertising cures for these diseases. But Ayurveda, says Ashwini Uppadhyay, always had a cure for many of these diseases. It has come to the rescue of many people after the Allopathic system of medicine has failed them. Yet, the Supreme Court passed a judgment against Patanjali based on an archaic law. The apex court should have gone through the vast corpus of Ayurvedic literature and analyzed the science of Ayurveda and not relied solely on the evidence of IMA, he says.
There is a term called bio-piracy that refers to the use of biological material and associated traditional knowledge of various indigenous communities without consent and for commercial gain, often without giving compensation or credit to the communities that developed and maintained this knowledge. Bio-piracy has become a serious threat in Bharat over time with all sorts of international stakeholders claiming patents for the country’s indigenous and traditional systems of cure. This is the real subtext of the international pharma lobby’s propaganda against Ayurveda. It doesn’t want indigenous systems of medicine like the Ayurveda to gain prominence and enjoy market success because then it wouldn’t be able to appropriate, rather steal traditional systems of cure and call them its own innovation. That’s why the global smear campaign against Ayurveda in general and Bharat’s Patanjali Ayurved in particular. Patanjali Ayurved is the only Ayurveda company in Bharat to have made inroads into the mass market at such an unprecedented pace. It’s giving tough competition to the big pharma and that’s why an industry body like IMA, represented solely by the Allopathic System of Medicine, is hounding Patanjali Ayurved.
Bio-piracy has a long history in the context of Bharat. Back in the 1990s, some university scientists in the US filed a patent for using turmeric to help heal wounds. Two American researchers of Bharatiya origin, Suman K. Das and Hari Har P. Cohly of the University of Mississippi Medical Center, put a claim to the US Patent and Trademark Office maintaining they had discovered Haldi’s healing properties. Surprisingly enough, they were granted the patent in March 1995. This meant that they had exclusive rights over any drug with haldi as an ingredient and could make millions of dollars out of this!
The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research of Bharat (CSIR) under the leadership of Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, its then Director-General fought a legal and diplomatic battle over this, and in 1997, their efforts bore fruit as the US Patent Office acknowledged it had made a mistake and cancelled the Turmeric patent.
An insightful podcast by NPR featuring Dr Mashelkar outlines his contribution towards saving Bharat’s indigenous knowledge systems from the prying eyes of various stakeholders looking to capitalize on these systems without giving due credit to the communities and mint profit. Dr Mashelkar, in the 1990s, took the initiative to set up a digital library of various indigenous medicine systems of Bharat, as per the podcast.
The whole Patanjali episode highlights the global hegemony of big pharma and its influence on Bharat. The government has its own ministry of indigenous systems of medicine and cure called the Ayush. When the government is taking so many initiatives to promote Bharat’s indigenous systems of medicine, how come an organization like the IMA has no representation of doctors from Ayurveda, homeopathy, and other traditional systems of medicine? The IMA was founded in 1928 when Bharat was under the British colonial rule. On its website, IMA calls itself “the largest represented organization of doctors of modern system of medicine in India which looks after the interests of doctors as well as the wellbeing of the community at large”. If IMA represents only the Allopathic system of medicine, how can it claim to be the most important medical body in a country where different indigenous systems of medicine also exist? Does that mean that those indigenous systems are unscientific and of lesser origin? Look at the hypocrisy of it. If an international medical journal like Lancet publishes a paper on the medicinal properties of Ashwagandha or Ghritkumari, it will be taken very seriously. But if Baba Ramdev sells medicines the constituents of which are Ashwagandha, Mulethi, Ghrit Kumari, etc. then the company is making misleading claims. What kind of twisted logic is that?
In view of Patanjali Ayurved being hounded by the IMA, the government should step in and either reform an organization like the IMA to include representation for indigenous systems of medicine like the Ayurveda or constitute a new medical body that has representation from all systems of medicine, and not just Ayurveda.
It would perhaps be apt to end with X posts by some netizens who say that they stand with Baba Ramdev and Patanjali and are against the hegemony of the big pharma.
