The White Towel on the Sarkari Chair: Why Tukaram Mundhe’s Small Gesture Went Viral
It lasted only a few seconds. Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe walked into a press conference room where cameras and microphones were already in place. He reached his chair, pulled off the white towel draped over it, and sat down. The clip spread quickly across social media. For many viewers, it was not about furniture. It was about what that towel has come to mean in Indian government offices.
Mundhe has not issued a long public explanation of the moment. He did not need to. In the visual language of Indian bureaucracy, a white towel on a chair is rarely just a towel. It is a quiet marker of rank: the senior-most person in the room, or a visiting dignitary, sits on the covered seat. Everyone else usually does not. Removing it in front of the media was widely read as a refusal of that small piece of VIP theatre.
Who the officer is
Mundhe is a 2005-batch IAS officer of the Maharashtra cadre, born in 1975 into a farming family in Tadsonna village in Beed district. He joined the service after securing All India Rank 20 in the Civil Services Examination. He is now 51. His career has been defined as much by transfers as by postings. Reports put the number at more than 20, and often around 24 or 25, across 21 years — roughly one move every ten months. That record has become part of his public story: an officer who takes decisions that annoy powerful interests and then moves on.
He took charge as Maharashtra FDA Commissioner on 25 May 2026. Within weeks he turned a relatively low-profile regulatory job into a statewide spectacle. Teams inspected restaurants, warehouses, dairies, hotels, cricket clubs, ice-cream parlours and food factories. By late July and August, official figures cited more than 3,000 inspections, seizures running into tens of crores of rupees, and scores of licence suspensions. Outlets of national chains including Domino’s, Pizza Hut and McDonald’s were among those penalised after inspectors reported pests, rotting food or other hygiene failures. Gutkha and pan masala networks, fake paneer, misleading health claims and even a high-court canteen came under scrutiny. Businesses complained of high-handedness. Large sections of the public treated him as a rare official who actually enforced the rules. Some called him the “Singham” of the IAS. He has said he does not see himself that way. In interviews he has repeated a simpler line: he is only trying to do the job that the post requires.
That context matters. A towel-pull by an unknown desk officer would have been a curiosity. A towel-pull by the man already filling phone screens with kitchen raids became a statement.
Where the white towel came from
There is no government order that invented the custom. No gazette notification tells staff to drape a white cloth on the boss’s chair. The practice survived by habit.
The most common explanation is practical and colonial. Before air-conditioning, paved roads and frequent car travel, officers moved through heat and dust. They arrived sweaty. Hair oil stained fabric. Upholstery was expensive to clean. A washable white towel solved several problems at once: it absorbed sweat, protected the chair, and could be changed cheaply. White showed dirt quickly, which made it look formal and “clean” if it was replaced often. Former bureaucrat Gurdeep Singh Sappal put the afterlife of the custom in one line: the British left, the horses were sent away, but the towels stayed.
Utility faded. Status did not. In many offices the towel stopped being about hygiene and became about hierarchy. The covered chair was the important chair. An extra towelled seat sometimes appeared for a visiting minister or senior officer. In 2024, legislators in Uttar Pradesh objected that bureaucrats were sitting on taller chairs with white towels while elected representatives were given ordinary seats. The dispute was serious enough for the chief secretary to hold a video conference. Later instructions said MPs, MLAs and MLCs should get chairs of the same height and decor, including the towel. The fight was not really about cloth. It was about who sits above whom.
Similar symbols still clutter official life: chair height, table size, ink colour on files, the red telephone, the peon outside the door. The towel is one of the most visible because cameras catch it every time a senior officer takes a seat at a briefing.
Why this clip landed
Mundhe’s gesture fitted a larger public mood. People are tired of VIP culture that shows up in convoy lights, special chairs, and small privileges that cost little but advertise power. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay was noticed earlier in 2026 for dropping the towel from his official chair after a social-media appeal, another sign that the custom is now being questioned rather than ignored.
Online reaction to Mundhe’s clip was mostly praise. Users called it a rejection of “babu culture” and a preference for work over display. A smaller set of comments was more sceptical. If the press conference was in his own premises, they asked, why was the towel there at all? Staff usually learn an officer’s habits. Some wondered whether the moment was staged for cameras. That doubt does not erase the symbolism. It does remind viewers that one gesture is not the same as systemic change. A towel can come off in five seconds. Transfer orders, political pressure and the daily theatre of official rank take much longer to unwind.
Mundhe himself has been careful not to turn every act into a sermon. In a recent interview he said he does not think he has done anything inspirational or extraordinary. He is trying to do what the role expects, “nothing less than that, nothing more than that.” If more people simply performed their roles, he added, society would be better for it. That is a modest claim. It is also why the towel moment worked. It looked like the same instinct that drives his raids: strip away the extra performance and deal with the thing in front of you.
What a towel cannot fix
Removing a cloth from a chair will not clean kitchens, stop adulterated paneer, or settle the political fights that have followed Mundhe from posting to posting. It will not rewrite the unwritten rules that still decide who waits outside whose door. Indian administration still runs on files, hierarchy and the fear of transfer. Mundhe’s own career is proof of that last point.
What the clip did do is make a hidden custom visible. Millions of people who have sat in government offices for years finally asked a simple question: why is that towel there? The honest answer is mixed. Part hygiene from another century. Part habit. Part status. Once a practice becomes a badge of rank, it is hard to defend as mere cleanliness. Air-conditioned rooms and wipeable chairs exist. The towel remains because it signals who matters in the room.
That is why a few seconds of footage travelled so far. It was not a policy announcement. It was a picture of an officer treating a chair as a chair. In a system that still loves its small thrones, that was enough to start an argument. The towel can go back on tomorrow. The question it raised will not.
About The Author
