India has myriad religious festivals for which its followers give up non-vegetarian food; at many others, meat and fish are staple servings. Many reasons dictate why Indians are vegetarian or not, and religious observance plays just one part in that decision - health, income and personal preference also count. For centuries, Indians have had little trouble accommodating these differences on the sensible universal understanding that dietary habits are choices to which everyone is entitled so long as they don't impinge on others. With its enormous variety of cuisine, reflecting its multi-cultural populace, culinary freedom of choice can almost be called an article of faith, one of the many elements that make up the unique idea of India. When state power is imposed on these personal choices, that too to seemingly serve narrow political ends, Indians need to worry.
The Bharatiya Janata Party-led Maharashtra government's two-day ban on meat sales during the Jain festival of Paryushan, now being heard in court, is a good reason to start. It is unfortunate that the controversy is being erroneously framed by the Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena on a xenophobic Gujarati-versus-Marathi paradigm because both antagonists ignore the equally important rights of the other meat-eating communities that comprise India's most culturally diverse and global of cities. To be sure, a ban on meat sales in Maharashtra has been enforced in the past also. But in the present context in which the ban was sought to be enforced, it reflects a fundamental contradiction of the basis of the Hindutva ideology and thinking. It appears to be a cynical pandering to a minority community (Jains) for political gains (the 2017 local body election) at the expense of the majority. Mumbai's example has set off competitive pressures across the states with Jammu & Kashmir banning beef and Chhatisgarh banning meat for the four days of Paryushan and eight days of the 10-day-long Ganesh Chaturthi festival.
State-directed dietary bans mark an unwarranted expansion of the state's intrusion on citizens' lives. It raises the disturbing question of the limits of this power, especially when the objectives are intimidating and exclusionary. Consider that in the space of a year and a half of the BJP government coming to power at the Centre, its state government satellites have seen fit to impose its narrow version of Hinduism on Indian diets. Banning beef, for instance, sends an unmistakably minatory message to Muslims, quite apart from depriving several of their livelihoods. Beef, in fact, has been a cause of extreme provocation to proponents of Hindutva, for some years now. Its votaries feel threatened enough to publicly vilify and threaten the respected historian Romila Thapar for suggesting on the basis of her research the Aryans ate beef and the scriptures permitted it in some contexts.
But the Madhya Pradesh government's move to proscribe eggs from midday meal schemes is equally egregious, especially when it has been done to align with the dietary preferences of the chief minister. The chief minister, of course, does not partake of these meals, so he is overlooking the fact that he is denying needy children an important source of animal protein. Finally, the concern to establish some sort of spurious uniformity on a religion that has endured for its innate pluralism also ignores some important economic signals. The fact that eggs, milk, meat and fish were the major items powering astronomical food inflation in the recent past is an indicator that more and more Indians, enjoying expanding incomes, are inclined to be non-vegetarian. In the end, that basic economic fact may defeat the votaries of religious diet control.
