The culture war against meat-eaters

It is part of a concerted attempt to codify a rigid, monolithic idea of Indian culture

An NGO called the Sattvik Council of India has announced that it has tied up with the Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) for awarding "sattvik" certificates to some trains, especially those serving pilgrim spots and religious destinations. Apparently, the IRCTC wants to make these trains 100 per cent vegetarian in all respects, and the said certificates are supposed to guarantee their righteous and morally pure (hence, sattvik) status.

Though the IRCTC itself has not issued any statement to this effect as yet, the plan does not sound implausible, given the frequency and ferocity with which meat-eating has been opposed — and vegetarianism advanced — in recent days. Last week municipal bodies in Rajkot, Vadodara and Junagarh in Gujarat issued orders to remove all roadside carts selling non-vegetarian food unless kept "properly covered". The reason cited was that the sight of meat, fish, poultry and eggs offended religious sentiments and that the carts were causing traffic snarls. ('Traffic snarls' have become a handy pretext for banning this or that — the permission to hold Friday namaz in several areas of Gurugram in BJP-ruled Haryana has been cancelled ostensibly because they were a serious impediment to the flow of traffic.)

It is not just Rajkot, Vadodara and Junagarh which have launched a crusade against the sale of non-veg food. Close on their heels, the Ahmedabad Municipal Commission revenue committee chairman, Jainik Vakil, wrote to the municipal commissioner, urging similar prohibitory orders in the city. "Keeping in mind Gujarat's identity and Karnavati (Ahmedabad) city's cultural tradition, it is important to immediately clear encroachment by illegally proliferating non-vegetarian food carts on city's public roads…" he said in the letter.

The question is, can one person or group's idea of a state's identity and culture be uniformly applied to the incredibly diverse body of people who make up this land? Can that idea be imposed on those who may subscribe to a completely different set of cultural values and dietary habits, and which they have a right to practise by virtue of the fact that India is a democracy that enshrines one's freedom of choice in such matters?

According to the Government of India's Sample Registration System Baseline Survey 2014, as much as 71 per cent of Indians eat non-vegetarian food. In other words, strict vegetarians are a minority in this country. And yet, states ruled by the Hindu nationalist BJP have been leading a charge against meat-eaters and trying to portray non-vegetarianism as unclean and against Indian culture.

Earlier this year, the Municipal Commission of Gurugram, a bustling cosmopolitan city, banned the sale of meat on Tuesdays, apparently in deference to Hindu sentiments. It also approved the proposal to double the licence fee for meat shops from Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000. Many states direct meat shops to stay shut during Hindu festivals like Navaratri. Not content with outlawing cow slaughter and the sale of beef, BJP-ruled states have been whipping up a visceral hatred towards meat itself, which is perhaps why the once numerous biryani shops in Gurugram have dwindled in recent times. Thuggish right-wing groups tend to lynch first (on suspicion that the biryani contains beef) and test the meat later.

The repeated attempts to demonise non-vegetarianism — a BJP leader in Madhya Pradesh had once declared that children would turn into cannibals if they were given eggs in their mid-day meals — and project it as anti-Hindu and contrary to Indian culture are, of course, a brazen distortion of facts, since meat-eaters outnumber, and, no doubt, have always outnumbered, the abstainers by a huge margin.

The idea that a vegetarian diet is pure and morally superior is a narrow, Brahminical construct. Hence, identifying it with Indian culture in general, and Hinduism in particular, while carrying on an increasingly militant campaign against the consumption and sale of meat, is really forcing the will of a few down the throats of millions. It strikes at the heart of India's vigorous cultural diversity and propagates the dangerous notion that there is only one "right" kind of Indian — someone who conforms to the attributes of culture as laid down by the state.

And this ties in with the growing trend of clamping down on personal liberties and freedom of choice that we are witnessing in every sphere of Indian society today. The effort to dictate what we eat is no different from the effort to control what we wear, whom we love, what we read, what we say or write, and so on. It is all part of a concerted attempt to codify, as it were, a rigid, monolithic idea of Indian culture, which, by definition, is non-inclusive, anti-liberal, and a monstrous distortion of the spirit of the Constitution.

The rule of the mob, which have become violent flag-bearers of this culture war, is only a short step from here. On Monday, members of the Bajrang Dal, a Hindu right-wing group, set fire to Congress leader Salman Khurshid's house in Nainital to punish him for having drawn a parallel between Hindu extremism and Islamic terror. And that's just one example of the innumerable instances of vicious cultural vigilantism that we have witnessed in the last few years.

The hallmark of modern society is openness. It is about letting in and being tolerant of diverse influences, ideas and inclinations and becoming enriched by them. The obsession with racial purity in Germany in the 1930s led to the human catastrophe called the Holocaust. We will have to wait and see where a perverted vision of India's "cultural purity" takes us.

(Shuma Raha is a journalist and author)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.