If you believe the ads, it's the 11 herbs and spices that keep fast-food aficionados streaming through the plate-glass doors of Kentucky Fried Chicken's 9,400 outlets in 78 countries. But not in India, where Colonel Sanders' secret recipe has brought down the shutters. In the southern Indian city of Bangalore, the first KFC outlet was temporarily closed two months ago after food inspectors charged that the chicken had illegally high levels of monosodium glutamate. A second outlet was opened in mid-October and swiftly visited by city officials who found the chemical sodium aluminum phosphate in the coating mix imported from the U.S. A follow-up inspection turned up a pair of flies buzzing around the Colonel's kitchen, and so the restaurant was closed 23 days after opening.

KFC parent Pepsico Inc., which had hoped to have a good number of Indians licking their fingers by now, is instead licking its wounds. "The chicken we sell is exactly the same as that sold around the world," protests Sandeep Kohli, managing director of Pepsico Restaurants (India) Private Ltd. "There is no reason why we should have any issues."

In fact there is. In both Bangalore and New Delhi the closures were ordered by governments that take a dim view of multinationals entering India. Pepsi is among the first to come in with fast food--it plans 60 KFC and Pizza Hut outlets in the next seven years, an $80 million investment--and that's a sector that acts as a lightning rod for nationalists warning of an imminent cultural invasion. The food isn't the target as much as the big-name chains serving it up. "You can't attack spaghetti," says Swaminathan Aiyar, consulting editor of the Economic Times. "Pizza is too diffuse. But, ah, Pizza Hut."

In New Delhi, where KFC is closed until a hearing scheduled for Nov. 24, the attack is led by a city government run by the B.J.P., which in itself is heavily bankrolled by Indian industrialists with the most to lose from an open economy. "At the present state of our development, we have to be careful," says the party's economic guru, Jay Dubashi. "Foreign investment is welcome, but the major effort has to be by Indians." The assault on multinationals is also designed to impress voters, though it might be dismissed as a pre-election stunt. Many Delhi residents were surprised that a restaurant would be closed on account of two flies--evidence to them that KFC was running one of the cleanest kitchens around. In a land where food adulteration is rampant, there was little alarm over a touch of sodium aluminum phosphate, an ingredient in baking soda approved, within limits, by the World Health Organization and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. To test msg levels, an independent Indian weekly, Outlook, bought samples of fried chicken from various restaurants in New Delhi and took them to the Food Research and Analysis Center of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce. KFC had the highest level--one considerably above the legal maximum. Pepsi says Indian labs aren't equipped to measure the additive accurately.

Even so, the larger lesson is political, not medical or gastronomical, and for multinationals coming into India, it's not a difficult one to fathom. Says Pepsi's Kohli: "They should keep as low profile as possible."

--By Anthony Spaeth. Reported by Dick Thompson/New Delhi