In his vastly entertaining novel, The Miracle, Irving Wallace regales the readers with the exploits of his fictional character who bilks the desperately ill clutching at straws. Lourdes in France is the locale, the place where Mary of the Immaculate Conception is believed to be making periodic appearances to cure a select terminally ill people. This character gets his wife, supposed to have been earlier miraculously cured by Virgin Mary, to deliver a lecture at a restaurant where the terminally ill hang to her words in the hope of getting similar salvation, shelling out extravagant amounts as a price for the dinner garnished with lessons on faith spanning three hours. The grateful restaurant owner, of course, doesn’t mind sharing the spoils with this intrepid character.
Something eerily similar seems to have happened in Gurugram, which lies cheek-in-jowl with Delhi. Realtech Development and Infrastructure (India) Pvt Ltd reportedly started a residential project named ‘Sharapova’ after the tennis legend Maria Sharapova of Russia, who has since hung her boots. A block was, for good measure, named after Formula 1 legend Michael Schumacher so as to dupe both the tennis and racing enthusiasts.
The project brochure contained for its USP lavish praises heaped by these blue-blooded celebrities of foreign pedigree. Sharapova in particular is alleged to have promised a tennis academy inside the complex to an awe-struck audience of wannabe buyers eating out of her hands at a promotional dinner.
One Shafali Agarwal, a resident of Chattarpur Mini Farm in New Delhi, complained that she had booked an apartment in the project forking out an advance of Rs 80 lakh in the hope that she would get her fancy house in 2016 as promised by the builder. The project predictably never saw the light of the day. On her complaint, the local court had asked the police to register an FIR. The FIR has been registered under Sections 34 (common intention), 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating) of the IPC at the Badshahpur police station which names the sports stars too among others as the perpetrators of the offences.
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To be sure, the complainant might get some deterrent compensation from the charlatan-builder but one wonders whether the much-vaunted long arm of the law would be able to bring the sports stars to justice. Distance lends disenchantment goes a cliché. India often faces an impregnable wall of resistance while dealing with criminals and defaulters who have either fled or are residents abroad. Indian businessmen who have defrauded the Indian banks are thumbing their noses from distant but salubrious foreign soils. If they remain incorrigible, one can imagine what the denouement is going to be with foreigners. In that sense, distance also seems to beget smug immunity!
The larger point however is the enormous power of celebrities to sway gullible and trusting consumers often to their detriment. To be sure again, the supposedly more stringent (vis-à-vis its 1985 version) Consumer Protection Act, 2019 seeks to rouse celebrities from their complacence by making them also responsible for false or misleading advertisements. Penalty amounts ranging from of Rs 10 lakh and one year imprisonment to Rs 50 lakh and five-year imprisonment await them if they are found to be lax and not exercising due diligence. A one-to-three-year ban on endorsements is a more galling penalty in store for them if found guilty.
Coming back to the Gurugram story, well it happened much before the new-fangled consumer protection law came into force. Not that it has fangs enough to bring foreigners to justice but it at least has the provisions warning the celebrities both indigenous and foreign against taking things for granted and not parroting what the brand owner has scripted often with dollops of exaggeration and puffery besides being riddled with blatant lies.
Caveat emptor is a much-reviled legal maxim because it puts the onus on the buyer. But in the glamorous world of advertisements, consumers must be on their guard and not let themselves be carried away by the star power. More so when the product or service doesn’t belong to the impulse-purchase genre but to the lifetime investment genre namely immovable properties. Maria Sharapova, who has created a candy brand called
Sugarpova and hence aware of the celebrity sway over consumers, must be laughing up her sleeve at the huge naivete of the Gurugram buyers. But both she and Schumacher would most certainly suffer pangs of conscience, should they introspect, at having struck a Faustian deal with the despicable Indian realtor for a mess of pottage (considering their millions earned from sports) if the allegations against them are true. Sharapova had earlier been in the eye of storm for promoting admittedly a potentially harmful product candy.
Critics rightly averred then that it is after all human to have sweet tooth but unless the excessive sugar consumption is burnt, obesity and diabetes could come to haunt her doting fans. Incidentally this precisely is what the Indian law celebrities to do--to point out the downsides of the product/service too.
Having said that one would readily concede that in Wallace’s novel, the dying patients were clutching at straws but Gurugram buyers ought to have taken claims by the wily builder and his celebrity-collaborators with a huge pinch of salt by demanding credible guarantees against default. And the CBDT should immediately swing into action to find out if tax was deducted at source by the builder from the endorsement fees payable to the two non-resident celebrities. Under section 195, no payment can be made to non-residents by an Indian resident unless the requisite tax has been deducted at source. This investigation would be revealing in that if this obligation has not been complied with it can be justly presumed that once again non-resident have benefited from a secretive offshore bank account that for good measure also happens to be a tax haven.
Read other pieces by S Murlidharan here. 
