Context
The FSSAI, specifically through its regional offices (often cited in Uttar Pradesh/Lucknow), filed an FIR (First Information Report) against the creator of Khurpench based on several key complaints:
Unauthorized Inspections:
FSSAI maintains that only authorized Food Safety Officers have the legal right to enter and inspect food premises. They allege the creator acted as a "self-styled" regulator without legal authority.
Extortion Allegations:
Some reports and complaints from food business operators suggest that the channel's methods involved threatening business owners with negative publicity unless certain demands were met.
Spreading Panic:
The authorities argue that the videos often lack scientific backing and are edited to create "sensationalism," which can cause unnecessary public panic and damage the reputation of legitimate businesses.
Obstruction of Duty:
In some instances, it is alleged that these "raids" interfered with the official process of food safety monitoring.
The Other Side (Public Sentiment
On the flip side, many viewers support Khurpench, arguing that the channel exposes genuine hygiene issues that official inspectors might overlook.
It serves as a form of citizen journalism in an environment where food safety standards are often poorly enforced.
Current Status
The legal action is centered on the distinction between whistleblowing and vigilantism. While highlighting food safety is a public service, doing so by trespassing or allegedly intimidating business owners crosses into legal violations under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and the Food Safety and Standards Act.
The Fact :
The FIR isn't necessarily about whether the food was dirty, but rather about the legality of the methods used to film it and the alleged misuse of influence.
Commentary
But something has been going wrong in recent years. The government, which was meant to serve the citizen, has increasingly started to act against the citizen. One of the most disturbing examples of this is the growing trend of the state filing FIRs — First Information Reports — against ordinary individuals, journalists, activists, food sellers, and even institutions, as a weapon of intimidation rather than as a tool of justice.
This essay is a serious examination of that trend. It looks at how FSSAI — the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India — has been filing FIRs against individuals instead of fixing its own failures. It also looks at how the government has been silently weakening the Right to Information Act. It looks at the troubling silence on the Bengal post-election violence. It looks at the UGC regulations that are being used to control academic institutions. And it asks a fundamental question: in trying so hard to control, is this government slowly repeating the very mistakes that made the Emergency of 1975 one of the darkest chapters in Indian history?
The FSSAI Problem: Punishing the Victim Instead of Fixing the System
Let us start with food. Every Indian citizen has the right to eat safe and clean food. That right is supposed to be protected by FSSAI — the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India. FSSAI was created with a good purpose: to maintain food quality, stop adulteration, and ensure that what reaches our plates does not harm us.
But look at the ground reality. Walk through any Indian city. Look at the roadside eateries, the packed processed foods, the unlabelled containers in local shops. Food adulteration is rampant. Unhygienic conditions are common. Poor storage practices are everywhere. FSSAI knows this. We the people know this. And the data also shows this — thousands of food samples fail quality tests every single year.
Now, instead of honestly confronting these systemic failures — the lack of trained inspectors, the absence of proper cold chains, the inadequate laboratories, the poorly implemented standards — what has FSSAI been doing? It has been filing FIRs against small traders, individual sellers, and tiny establishments. Punishing the small fish while the big pond remains dirty.
This is not just a policy failure. This is an abuse of power. When the state uses the police machinery — which in India carries enormous psychological and social weight — against a X (formerly twitter) handle, it is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. More importantly, it is using that sledgehammer to avoid looking in the mirror.
The core issue is this: does a police complaint fix a broken food safety system? Of course not. What fixes a broken system is investment, training, awareness, better regulation, and honest governance — not FIRs.
And here is the deeper irony. Will the police — who are overworked, underpaid, and overburdened with law and order issues — file FIRs against powerful food corporations whose products have failed quality tests? Will they act against large companies whose advertisements mislead consumers? Experience tells us the answer is almost always no. The FIR weapon is reserved for the weak. The powerful escape. That is not justice. That is selective persecution.
RTI Under Attack
The Right to Information Act of 2005 is one of the greatest democratic achievements of independent India. It gave ordinary citizens a legal weapon to ask questions of the government. It gave them the power to demand documents, records, files, and explanations from any public authority. It made secrecy difficult and accountability possible.
For years after its passage, the RTI Act genuinely empowered millions of citizens. Farmers used it to find out why their land records were changed without their knowledge. Students used it to expose corruption in examinations. Activists used it to uncover scams in public projects. Journalists used it to investigate government decisions. The RTI became the citizen's greatest tool against the opaque wall of bureaucracy.
But in recent years, this tool has been progressively blunted. The Economic Survey — the government's own prestigious annual document on the state of the Indian economy — made observations that were widely interpreted as critical of the RTI framework, suggesting that excessive information demands burden the administration. This framing itself is dangerous because it shifts the burden of transparency from the government to the citizen. The government's inconvenience becomes a reason to restrict the citizen's right.
Beyond the Economic Survey, the 2019 amendment to the RTI Act changed the terms of appointment of Information Commissioners — making them more dependent on the central government's discretion. This directly weakened the independence of the very bodies that were meant to enforce accountability. An Information Commissioner who can be removed or whose tenure can be altered at the government's pleasure is not truly independent.
The message this sends is chilling. It tells citizens that their questions are not always welcome. It tells RTI activists — many of whom have already faced violence, harassment, and in some cases death — that the state is not on their side. And it tells the international community that India's commitment to transparency, already tested by its declining ranking on press freedom indices, is not as strong as its Constitution demands.
A democracy that fears questions is not truly democratic. Transparency is not a gift the government gives to citizens. It is a right that citizens possess. Any move to dilute RTI is a move against the soul of democratic India.
The UGC Regulations
Education is the foundation of a free society. Universities are not just places where degrees are handed out. They are spaces where ideas are tested, where young minds are trained to question, to argue, to discover, and to challenge. The health of a democracy is closely linked to the health of its educational institutions.
In recent years, the University Grants Commission — the body that regulates higher education in India — has introduced a series of regulations and guidelines that have raised serious concerns among academics, educators, and civil society groups. New rules around the appointment of Vice Chancellors, new conditions attached to university funding, new frameworks for curriculum design — all of these give the central government significantly more power over institutions that were constitutionally meant to enjoy a degree of academic autonomy.
When the government controls who can run a university, what can be taught, and how research funding is distributed, it is not just regulating education. It is regulating thought. And regulated thought is not free thought. A student who is taught only what the government approves, in an institution run by a person the government prefers, using a curriculum the government designs, is not being educated. He is being trained to conform.
The opposition to these UGC regulations has come not just from left-leaning academics, but from a wide spectrum of educationists who believe that academic freedom is not a luxury — it is a necessity. India cannot aspire to be a global knowledge economy while simultaneously narrowing the space for intellectual freedom in its universities.
The Great Silence on Bengal Violence: Selective Outrage
In the aftermath of the 2021 West Bengal Assembly elections, widespread violence was reported across the state. Workers of political parties were attacked. Homes were burnt. Lives were lost. People were displaced. It was a dark moment that raised serious questions about the rule of law and the safety of political workers.
Now, any honest government that claims to stand for constitutional values, protection of life, and political freedom must speak loudly and clearly against such violence — regardless of which party is in power in the state and regardless of which party's workers are affected. Political violence anywhere in India is a threat to democracy everywhere in India.
But what was the response of the central government? There was a great silence. Where there should have been urgent intervention under constitutional provisions, there was hesitation. Where there should have been firm statements about the protection of citizens' rights, there was political calculation. The victims of that violence — real people, with families and fears — deserved better from the highest offices of the land.
This silence is particularly noteworthy because the same government has been vocal, aggressive, and quick to act when violence has occurred in other political contexts that serve its narrative. When the state speaks loudly in some cases and goes quiet in others, it sends a message: not all citizens are equally protected. Not all violence is equally condemned. That kind of selective outrage corrodes the trust that citizens must place in their government to be fair and just.
The Ghost of the Emergency
On June 25, 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a State of Emergency in India. For 21 months, fundamental rights were suspended. The press was censored. Opposition leaders were imprisoned. Courts were neutered. Bureaucracy became an instrument of personal power. Citizens lived in fear.
The Emergency is remembered as the darkest chapter in Indian democracy. It scarred a generation. It broke the faith of millions. And when it ended, the Indian voter delivered a verdict so massive and so decisive that it swept the Congress party out of power for the first time since independence. The Emergency became a lesson — a lesson that power must have limits, that the Constitution must be respected, and that the citizen must never be made to feel like a subject of the state.
Today's ruling dispensation came to power partly by invoking this history. It built much of its political identity on the critique of the Emergency — the suspension of freedom, the abuse of power, the silencing of opposition. It promised something different. It promised that the citizens of India would never again have to live under such conditions.
But ask yourself: what concrete, institutional safeguards have been put in place to ensure the Emergency can never happen again? Has a law been passed to formally limit the government's ability to invoke emergency powers arbitrarily? Has the press freedom index improved under this government's watch? Have RTI protections been strengthened? Have judicial appointments become more independent and transparent? Have university autonomy provisions been codified more firmly?
The honest answer to most of these questions is no. In fact, on several fronts, the trend has moved in the opposite direction. Filing FIRs against citizens who criticise government policies. Weakening the RTI. Tightening control over universities. Maintaining strategic silence on inconvenient violence. These are not the building blocks of a government that has learned from the Emergency. These are the early warning signs of a government beginning to repeat it — not through the dramatic stroke of a presidential proclamation, but slowly, quietly, regulation by regulation, FIR by FIR.
The Emergency did not begin the day Indira Gandhi signed the order. It began years before, in the slow accumulation of unchecked power, the gradual shrinking of accountability, and the increasing tendency to treat dissent as a threat rather than as a democratic virtue. That is the lesson we must never forget.
Anti-Incumbency Is Not Just About Prices — It Is About Dignity
Political analysts often discuss anti-incumbency in terms of inflation, unemployment, infrastructure deficits, and welfare delivery. These are real and important factors. But there is another dimension that is often underestimated: the dignity dimension.
Citizens do not just want cheap onions. They want to be treated with respect. They want to know that when they file an RTI, it will be answered. They want to know that when violence happens, their government will speak up regardless of political convenience. They want to know that when a regulator like FSSAI fails to do its job, it is the regulator that will be held accountable — not a small shopkeeper who will be handed an FIR.
When a government consistently demonstrates that it is more interested in control than in service, more interested in power than in accountability, more interested in managing the narrative than in telling the truth, it loses the trust of its citizens. And in a democracy, lost trust eventually translates into lost votes. That is not a threat. That is the system working exactly as intended.
The growing anti-incumbency that observers note across various parts of India today is not simply a product of rising prices or unemployment. It is a product of citizens feeling unseen, unheard, and unprotected. It is the accumulated frustration of people who believed in promises of good governance and transparent administration, and who are now watching those promises quietly erode.
On June 25, 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a State of Emergency in India. For 21 months, fundamental rights were suspended. The press was censored. Opposition leaders were imprisoned. Courts were neutered. Bureaucracy became an instrument of personal power. Citizens lived in fear.
The Emergency is remembered as the darkest chapter in Indian democracy. It scarred a generation. It broke the faith of millions. And when it ended, the Indian voter delivered a verdict so massive and so decisive that it swept the Congress party out of power for the first time since independence. The Emergency became a lesson — a lesson that power must have limits, that the Constitution must be respected, and that the citizen must never be made to feel like a subject of the state.
Today's ruling dispensation came to power partly by invoking this history. It built much of its political identity on the critique of the Emergency — the suspension of freedom, the abuse of power, the silencing of opposition. It promised something different. It promised that the citizens of India would never again have to live under such conditions.
But ask yourself: what concrete, institutional safeguards have been put in place to ensure the Emergency can never happen again? Has a law been passed to formally limit the government's ability to invoke emergency powers arbitrarily? Has the press freedom index improved under this government's watch? Have RTI protections been strengthened? Have judicial appointments become more independent and transparent? Have university autonomy provisions been codified more firmly?
The honest answer to most of these questions is no. In fact, on several fronts, the trend has moved in the opposite direction. Filing FIRs against citizens who criticise government policies. Weakening the RTI. Tightening control over universities. Maintaining strategic silence on inconvenient violence. These are not the building blocks of a government that has learned from the Emergency. These are the early warning signs of a government beginning to repeat it — not through the dramatic stroke of a presidential proclamation, but slowly, quietly, regulation by regulation, FIR by FIR.
The Emergency did not begin the day Indira Gandhi signed the order. It began years before, in the slow accumulation of unchecked power, the gradual shrinking of accountability, and the increasing tendency to treat dissent as a threat rather than as a democratic virtue. That is the lesson we must never forget.
Anti-Incumbency Is Not Just About Prices — It Is About Dignity
Political analysts often discuss anti-incumbency in terms of inflation, unemployment, infrastructure deficits, and welfare delivery. These are real and important factors. But there is another dimension that is often underestimated: the dignity dimension.
Citizens do not just want cheap onions. They want to be treated with respect. They want to know that when they file an RTI, it will be answered. They want to know that when violence happens, their government will speak up regardless of political convenience. They want to know that when a regulator like FSSAI fails to do its job, it is the regulator that will be held accountable — not a small shopkeeper who will be handed an FIR.
When a government consistently demonstrates that it is more interested in control than in service, more interested in power than in accountability, more interested in managing the narrative than in telling the truth, it loses the trust of its citizens. And in a democracy, lost trust eventually translates into lost votes. That is not a threat. That is the system working exactly as intended.
The growing anti-incumbency that observers note across various parts of India today is not simply a product of rising prices or unemployment. It is a product of citizens feeling unseen, unheard, and unprotected. It is the accumulated frustration of people who believed in promises of good governance and transparent administration, and who are now watching those promises quietly erode.
A Citizen's Demand
The problems described in this essay are not beyond solution. They require political will, honest self-reflection, and a genuine recommitment to constitutional values. Here is what needs to change:
First, the practice of state agencies filing FIRs against citizens as a first resort must be scrapped. FIRs must be used only when there is a genuine criminal offence, not as an administrative tool of intimidation. FSSAI must be made accountable for its own failures before it starts filing complaints against others.
Second, the RTI Act must be strengthened — not weakened. Information Commissioners must be given full independence. Departments that consistently fail to respond to RTI requests must be penalised. The government must publicly commit to transparency as a value, not just as a legal obligation.
Third, university autonomy must be protected. The UGC's role should be to empower institutions, not to control them. Academic freedom is not a threat to national security — it is the bedrock of national progress. But Students politics must be permanently banned. Instead they must be reqarded for a good research, innovation and ideas.
Fourth, political violence — wherever it occurs, whoever its victims are — must be condemned by the central government without delay, without calculation, and without exception. The life of every Indian citizen is equally valuable.
Fifth, and most importantly, this government — and every government that comes after it — must take concrete, legislative steps to ensure that the Emergency can never be repeated. Not just in words. In law. In institutional design. In the protection of every citizen's fundamental rights.
IX. Conclusion: The Citizen Will Not Be Silenced
India is a great democracy. It has survived partition, famines, wars, insurgencies, economic crises, and yes — even an Emergency. It has survived because its citizens have never permanently surrendered their voice. Every time the state has overreached, the people have eventually pushed back.
The trends described in this essay — FIRs as weapons, RTI under attack, academic freedom shrinking, selective silence on violence — are troubling. They must be named. They must be criticised. And they must be resisted, not with violence, but with the most powerful tool available to a democratic citizen: informed, fearless, persistent speech.
We the people are watching. We the people are asking questions. And we the people, when the time comes, will give our answer at the ballot box — as we always have, and as we always will.
Democracy is not just a system of government. It is a promise — a promise made by the state to the citizen, by each generation to the next. That promise must be kept. Not because it is convenient. But because it is right and constitutional.
The problems described in this essay are not beyond solution. They require political will, honest self-reflection, and a genuine recommitment to constitutional values. Here is what needs to change:
First, the practice of state agencies filing FIRs against citizens as a first resort must be scrapped. FIRs must be used only when there is a genuine criminal offence, not as an administrative tool of intimidation. FSSAI must be made accountable for its own failures before it starts filing complaints against others.
Second, the RTI Act must be strengthened — not weakened. Information Commissioners must be given full independence. Departments that consistently fail to respond to RTI requests must be penalised. The government must publicly commit to transparency as a value, not just as a legal obligation.
Third, university autonomy must be protected. The UGC's role should be to empower institutions, not to control them. Academic freedom is not a threat to national security — it is the bedrock of national progress. But Students politics must be permanently banned. Instead they must be reqarded for a good research, innovation and ideas.
Fourth, political violence — wherever it occurs, whoever its victims are — must be condemned by the central government without delay, without calculation, and without exception. The life of every Indian citizen is equally valuable.
Fifth, and most importantly, this government — and every government that comes after it — must take concrete, legislative steps to ensure that the Emergency can never be repeated. Not just in words. In law. In institutional design. In the protection of every citizen's fundamental rights.
IX. Conclusion: The Citizen Will Not Be Silenced
India is a great democracy. It has survived partition, famines, wars, insurgencies, economic crises, and yes — even an Emergency. It has survived because its citizens have never permanently surrendered their voice. Every time the state has overreached, the people have eventually pushed back.
The trends described in this essay — FIRs as weapons, RTI under attack, academic freedom shrinking, selective silence on violence — are troubling. They must be named. They must be criticised. And they must be resisted, not with violence, but with the most powerful tool available to a democratic citizen: informed, fearless, persistent speech.
We the people are watching. We the people are asking questions. And we the people, when the time comes, will give our answer at the ballot box — as we always have, and as we always will.
Democracy is not just a system of government. It is a promise — a promise made by the state to the citizen, by each generation to the next. That promise must be kept. Not because it is convenient. But because it is right and constitutional.
This essay is an original work of political commentary authored by Satyam.
No part of this essay may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means,
including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods,
without the prior written permission of the author.
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