The need to “ensure trust of consumers” has been touted as one of the justifications for the ordinances.
All the official talk about consumer safety around the Uttar Pradesh government’s decision to bring in two ordinances on food contamination, making the offence cognisable and non-bailable, cannot divert attention from a disquieting intent, and effect. They will act as a communal dogwhistle that preys on the majority’s notions of purity and pollution, and targets an already insecure minority. Titled ‘Prevention of Pseudo and Anti-Harmony Activities and Prohibition of Spitting Ordinance 2024’ and ‘Uttar Pradesh Prevention of Contamination in Food (Consumer Right to Know) Ordinance 2024’, some provisions are unexceptionable. That food and beverage sellers should wear head covers, gloves and masks when cooking and serving, and that there should be CCTV coverage of the kitchen and dining areas of establishments, is reasonable. But what purpose of food safety would be served by mandating that personnel should wear identity cards at work? Such identity cards can, and will, come in handy for communal profiling. The legislative power to issue ordinances, as the Supreme Court has clarified, is “in the nature of an emergency power” given to the executive only to “meet an emergent situation”. What exigency, which could not have been met by enforcing existing food safety regulations, demanded such a move by the UP government? And what does food safety have to do, anyway, with social “harmony”?
These ordinances come in a larger, sobering context. In July, the Muzaffarnagar police ordered eateries along the route of the Kanwar Yatra to display the owners’ names. This was, the police said, so that “confusion” among the strictly vegetarian kanwariyas could be avoided. Two months after the SC stayed that order, correctly pointing out that it was “contrary to constitutional and legal norms”, the UP government issued statewide directives for eateries to mandatorily display the names and addresses of operators, proprietors and managers, citing “incidents of adulterating food items like juice, dal, and roti with human waste, inedible, or dirty substances”. Now, the two ordinances confirm a disquieting trend — from “bulldozer justice” to “love jihad” and “encounters” that the police wears as a badge of pride, to the new restrictions in the garb of food safety, UP is becoming a fount of bad laws and governance practices that should not be emulated.
The need to “ensure trust of consumers” has been touted as one of the justifications for the ordinances. But they put at risk, in fact, the trust that citizens repose in each other in an increasingly layered and changing economy. The prime mover of the gig economy, where everything from food to groceries to services reaches citizens’ homes on the back of innovations and efficiencies brought in by new technologies, and which provides employment to millions, is that same trust. In threatening to erode it, the UP ordinances are a terrible backward step.
© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
First uploaded on: 17-10-2024 at 01:09 IST
