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Food as a Victim of BJP Politics
Sumanta Banerjee
Our eating habits and choice of food are increasingly coming under pressure from the ruling party and its vigilantes, who are turning food into yet another issue of political contest. They are turning kitchens and meals into battlegrounds. BJP-ruled state governments close down meat shops during Hindu festivals, and the saffron brigade invade those shops – whether they are run by Hindu or Muslim butchers. Earlier they targeted beef, and lynched Muslim traders who were found to be transporting infertile cows to go-shalas or butcher shops. Then they demanded ban on all meat products, whether mutton or chicken. Now they are targeting even fish. They recently threatened fish stalls in Chittaranjan Park (a predominantly Bengali locality) in New Delhi. Their grouse was that the they were selling non-vegetarian stuff near a Kali temple. These semi-educated vigilantes of the Sangh Parivar mainly come from the Hindi-Hindu heartland, and are unaware of the fact that fish has been traditionally a staple and favourite food for Bengalis, and continues to satisfy their tastes in the form of various curries. As for their swearing by the name of Kali, they are again unaware of the fact that Bengalis worship the goddess Kali by sacrificing goats and cook their flesh to produce delicious curries for their consumption.
The ruling Sangh Parivar is trying to impose vegetarianism as a uniform diet on all of us. It claims that meat eating violates the tenets of Hinduism. The tenets of Hinduism according to them are derived from Manusmriti, written sometime during the first two centuries AD, by Manu the patriarch who laid down the rules of behavior for Hindus, who continue to swear by his name. He divided Hindu society by clearly defining four castes in a hierarchical order and ordaining them to follow distinct modes of activities and socio-religious functions to keep separate their caste identities. The present advocates of Hindutva who run the Indian state faithfully follow these rules.
Manu’s rules on food consumption
But what did Manu say about eating habits ? Let me quote a few verses from Manusmriti. Listen to this:
Nan ta dushyanaydanna/ Dhatraiba srishta…hyadhrasya praninottar ebo cha [Re: verse 5.30]
The eater incurs no sin by eating even daily, such animals as eatables, since the eater as well as the eaten animals have been created by the creator himself.
Or take this verse:
Mangsha bhokkhoyiat-s-mutra/ mangsho mih ihadmyaham [Re: verse 5. 44]
He whose flesh I eat in this life, shall eat my flesh in the next
Given these rules ordained by their guru Manu, why do the Sangh Parivar vigilantes violate them by banning meat and attacking traders and shops? In fact, their bosses in the RSS headquarters in Nagpur should warn them against insulting Manu. But then are their leaders like Mohan Bhagwat and others intellectually well-equipped to fully understand the various aspects and nuances of the controversial text Manusmriti?
Adverse impact of banning non-vegetarian food
The Sangh Parivar’s attempts to ban meat and impose vegetarianism on all, not only adversely impinges on the lives of vast sections of our people , but also violate provisions of the Constituition that guarantees every citizen the right to follow his/her life-style as long as it does not violate laws.
A large segment of our population inhabiting areas outside the Hindi-Hindu heartland of central India (known as the cow-belt) consume mutton and fish, and have invented delicious recipes that have won acclaim from foreign tourists. People of south Indian states, and those living in north-eastern and eastern states like Assam and Bengal, will be denied their fundamental right to choose food according to their tastes, if the state-supported Sangh Parivar vigilantes are allowed to have their way. Even in the western state of Maharashtra, the dalit Mahar community has invented recipes made from ingredients that are looked down upon by the upper caste Maharashtrians. They make a dish from leftovers thrown away by these upper-caste families after their dinners, by fermenting them to invent a new recipe. (Re: Shahu Patole: Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada). As Shahu Patole’s mother Gunabai Malik so rightly said: “Cooking is a game of estimates, jugglery and hypnotism.”
Gourmets, as well as gluttons describe the tasting of food as Charba, choshya, lehan. (meaning – chewing, sucking and moving your tongue over the food). The goons of the Sangh Parivar patronized by the Modi government are denying us our right to take part in this fabulous game. They have been trying to control our tongues so that we can’t voice protest. Now they are trying to control our tongues even to prevent us from asserting our right to choice of food.
[Sumanta Banerjee is a political commentator and writer, is the author of In The Wake of Naxalbari’ (1980 and 2008); The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta (1989) and ‘Memoirs of Roads: Calcutta from Colonial Urbanization to Global Modernization.’ (2016). Courtesy: Countercurrents.org, an India-based news, views and analysis website, that describes itself as non-partisan and taking “the Side of the People!” It is edited by Binu Mathew.]
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The Sangh’s Sustained Campaign Against Non-Veg Food is a Step Towards Becoming a Hindu Pakistan
Jawhar Sircar
Now that we are hell bent on becoming a Hindu Pakistan, how can we do without a Sunni-Shia divide, that has led to innumerable killings among Muslims in the real Pakistan? When hate becomes the cornerstone of the one-religion-one-country demand, then the ghost of Jinnah is bound to roam all over, to ensure that this hate just does not stop at one community.
Hate must ‘cleanse’ the ‘pure’ (pak) even more – to liquidate all among the chosen and victorious community who ‘differ’ and ‘contaminate’. Hardly a week passes in Pakistan without some fanatic blowing up whole assemblies of Shias in prayer.
Well, it is not as serious still in Hindustan – because all the rage and killings are still focused on Muslims. But a deadly morning may, quite likely, show the day that is to come. The sustained campaign of the Sangh parivar to root out non-vegetarian food is an unmistakable pointer.
Majority of Indians are non-vegetarian
The recent threats at the fish market of Chittaranjan Park in Delhi have set off alarm bells from – there to Bengal and to the Andamans. No self respecting Bengali will allow his fish to be stopped, insulted or even held liable for contaminating the environment around some nearby temples. After all, census data says 98.55 percent of Bengalis are non-vegetarians, and their obsessively favourite non-veg item is fish. And many other states have even higher percentages of non-vegetarians.
What the Sangh Parivar may not be aware is that the vast majority of Indians are proven non-vegetarians – even if some are just token ones. The core of this Parivar and its leadership comes from those castes that are historically associated with vegetarianism. Circumstances conditioned their diets and there is little that can be claimed by way of superiority, either religious or social.
Since one of these castes wrote the holy books, there is a bias in many of them towards abstention from meat and fish, but the same texts contained other prescriptions as well, that the descendants of these religious commentators hardly ever adhere to. As for traders, they moved from place to place, and it was always safer to stick to vegetables in distant stations, as fish and meat could harbour (if not handled well) various bacteria, including Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli, Listeria, and Vibrio, which can cause food-borne illnesses.
Their sheer occupational necessity was then converted into a great virtue, and groups that were historically despised for avarice and profiteering acquired brownie points by associating themselves with the diet of the priestly class. This bonding was strengthened through donations for temple building and religious activities.
This historic coupling and abhorrence towards non-vegetarian food continued when the Hindu Right organisations were being formed. Their core leadership is still very much in the hands of strict vegetarian upper social groups. Just run through the names of the top echelons of these organisations and this disproportionate share of such castes will strike everyone.
Now let’s come to facts. Only 5 of the 36 states and union territories of India have vegetarian-majority populations. According to a 2018 survey released by the Registrar General of India, only Rajasthan (74.9%), Haryana (69.25%), Punjab (66.75%), Gujarat (60.95%) and Madhya Pradesh (50.6%) have more vegetarians than non-vegetarians. These were followed by Uttar Pradesh (47.1%), Maharashtra (40.2%), Delhi (39.5%), Uttarakhand (27.35%), Karnataka (21.1%) and Assam (20.6%) after which came numerous states where 95 to 99 percent of people were/are non-vegetarians.
Census-based data establish, that approximately between 65 and 75% of Indians are non-vegetarians. Cherry picked results of the much delayed Household Consumer Expenditure Survey of 2022-23 were released just before the 2024 elections. But the report still stands in the way of the Sangh’s desire. It indicates that while the family spend on cereals has come down from 37.42% of their budget in 1999-2000 to 20.32 in 2011-12 and then plummeted to 10.59 in 2022-23 (thanks to free food), the expenditure on meat, fish and eggs went up from 5.59% in 1999-2000 to 10.59% in 2022-23.
Laws and bans against non-vegetarian food are being imposed in city after city
In fact, an analysis of data from two successive rounds of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) conducted in 2005-06 and 2015-16 shows that vegetarianism has in fact been on the decline over the past decade. If, we reject all the sarkari data we may opt for a quickie undertaken by the American Pew Centre – that is, hopefully, outside the hated/dreaded Soros zone.
Based on a survey of just 29,999 Indians, it declares that not 30 percent but almost 40 percent of Indians are vegetarian and that most vegetarians don’t eat food in non-veg homes. Even so, the largest section is still non-vegetarian and it is very very disconcerting to see how the non-veg is made to feel small – especially when close friends and school/college mates move away from her/his table nowadays. Demanding separate tables, messes, hostels, housing and the lot is akin to Shia-isation –just for starters.
For years, many major cities of Gujarat have prohibited the eating or selling non-vegetarian food, even when nearly 40 percent of the state’s population is non-vegetarian. In the holy places of Hindus, fish and meat have been banned for ages, and the rules strictly enforced. While such bans near temples may be understandable, the manner in which laws and bans against non-vegetarian food are being imposed in city after city is truly alarming.
Haridwar has been completely vegetarian since 1956. Then, towns like Rishikesh, Varanasi, Palitana, Vrindavan, Chitrakoot, Ayodhya, Pushkar and Mount Abu banned meat and fish either in the whole city or in large parts. Even in Deoband, a Muslim holy site, only vegetarian food is available now and even the small town of Dewa Sharif in Barabanki district is veg only.
Besides, in many Sangh-ruled states and local bodies, eggs are being taken out from mid-day meals in schools, despite doctors asserting that eggs are highly nutritious for malnourished children. With one stroke, the livelihoods of lakhs of people are being shut down. The freedom to choose one’s food is a democratic right recognised by the Indian Constitution, yet with lower courts (and even higher forums) becoming more and more blatantly one-sided, rulings also tend to favour the government.
Even the Supreme Court upheld the Central Government’s decision to ban chicken and eggs from mid-day meals for students in Lakshadweep, declaring it entirely legal. In 2004, the same apex court ruled that Haridwar Municipality’s order to stop sales of eggs was fully lawful, clarifying to the petitioner that it didn’t violate any fundamental rights.
We did not protest when they lynched others in the name of beef. Now, they are even after our eggs, fish, chicken and mutton. It’s really time to wake up and assert our constitutional rights — or else we will soon ensure an intolerant Hindu Pakistan.
(Jawhar Sircar is a former Rajya Sabha MP of the Trinamool Congress. He was earlier Secretary, Government of India, and CEO of Prasar Bharati. Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, and M. K. Venu.)
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Better Nutrition and Better Attendance – Yet Eggs are Being Removed in the Mid-Day Meal Scheme
Dr Sylvia Karpagam
[Extract. For full article, please see Countercurrents.org website.]
For as long as many of us remember, India has been projected as a ‘vegetarian’ country, when, in reality, only about 20-25% of the population self-identify as this category. Secondly, given that milk and dairy are animal source foods (ASF), a classification based on the terminology ‘veg’ is dodgy and unscientific. Further, identifying as ‘pure veg’ has no real basis or purpose other than sheer casteism.
The vegetarianism of India and the criminalisation of beef eaters has largely been normalised and accepted. What has crept up on the back of these two prejudices and largely unnoticed, has been the way eggs are also being pushed into the category of ‘polluted’ foods. So now we have a situation in the country, where any animal source food (other than dairy) has become triggers for vegetarian fragility and angst.
Criminalising and targeting eggs is a particularly concerning act because it directly violates child rights. Government mid-day meals, by unspoken agreement, do not usually serve meat, chicken, fish etc. to the children. So that takes away access to many nutrient dense foods. Now eggs are also being denied. This means that children, many of them malnourished, will now have no animal source foods in their mid-day meal – a cheap, unhealthy, nutrient poor almost vegan diet. These children are also repeatedly told (indoctrination) that this is the best food for them. That the nutritious foods that they eat at home – the dry fish, the eggs, organ meats, red meats, poultry, fish etc. are unhealthy, cruel and criminal. These children then carry these nutrient poor misconceptions into adulthood and inter-generationally. Those of us who work for human rights, should oppose this ideology led drain on children’s access to nutritious foods.
Concerned about the poor nutrition in the Kalyan Karnataka districts, a study done in 2021-22 by the Karnataka State Rural Development and Panchayati raj university, Gadag showed that 98% children consumed eggs when given as part of the mid-day meal scheme and providing eggs on alternate days increased the weights of children.
The earlier scare about cholesterol in eggs being responsible for heart disease has been disproved and cholesterol is no longer labelled as a nutrient of concern, however many doctors and those planning menus for children continue to vilify eggs, blaming them for several ailments.
Going by the science, eggs are almost a complete food because they have many of the nutrients required by the body in a highly bioavailable (well digested and absorbed by the body) form. One cooked egg of 60 gm contains 8 gm of protein which meets a large proportion of the daily protein requirements of children, and that too of very good quality. Eggs contain all the essential amino acids or protein building blocks that the child needs. Eggs also contain several other nutrients required by the body, especially growing children. Children 1-3 years require around 13 grams protein per day increasing to around 50 gm a day in adolescents and one egg can provide around 8 gm of this. Because children’s bodies are laying down muscle, bone etc. and also developing many of their other tissues, they need more protein per unit weight than adults. The National Institute of Nutrition also recommends ‘egg as a complete food for children’. The advantage of eggs is that it is small in quantity, so it’s easier for children to eat them, including the smaller children. If the child had to obtain the same quality and quantity through plant sources, they would have to eat a large quantity of food, which is difficult even for adults, leave alone children.
India produces a lot of eggs. In fact, it is the third largest producer in the world. But only 1/3 Indian households reportedly consume eggs because of economic barriers. Rural households consume less than 2 eggs a month compared to urban areas which consumes little more than 3 eggs. Randomised controlled trials have showed that when infants between 6-9 months are given one egg per day for 6 months, they show an increase in both height and weight for age compared to a control group of children who were similar in all respects, except consumption of eggs.
The health and well-being position paper reeks of unscientific prejudices
Sadly, there is a collusion between those with caste, religious and political clout to concertedly prevent children being provided eggs in the mid-day meal. A position paper on Health and Well-being put together by a committee, for the National education Policy (NEP) received tremendous criticism. The Chairman of this committee was Dr. K John Vijay Sagar, Professor and Head, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and members included an ayurveda physician, a yoga therapist, a gymnastic coach etc. A ‘holistic approach to health and well-being’ by this group is nothing more than casteist propaganda with zero allegiance to science or the abysmal nutritional condition of children in the country.
The report dismisses animal foods as causing interference in hormonal functions, diabetes, early menarche, primary infertility etc. which is apparently aggravated by the ‘small body frame of Indians’. These kinds of false messaging against animal foods is rampant, unchecked and unchallenged – a form of indoctrination that burdens the poor with malnutrition related conditions that have an intergenerational effect. They interchangeable use ‘Indian food culture’ and ‘Indian way of thinking’ to mean sattvik foods. They forget to include the food cultures of a majority of Indians in this artificial, casteist narrative around food.
Akshaya patra foundation – feeding propaganda with every sattvik meal
The Akshaya patra foundation is supposedly an independent charitable trust which is hoping to “solve at scale the overarching societal issues of classroom hunger and malnutrition in the country” by feeding all children sattvik, nutrient poor meals. Taking over the legally mandated government mid-day meal scheme, they provide food to around 2.25 million children in 23,581 government schools and anganwadis in 16 states and 3 union territories across the country. Thus an organisation that criminalises meat, poultry, fish and eggs is imposing its unscientific food prejudices on millions of children across the country. The reason that this is being unquestioningly imposed is because most people in power believe in the same ideology and most of those whose children are in these government schools are unable to raise their voices.
It is the nutrition of children which takes the hit in all of this power hierarchy. These prejudices are reaffirmed by other organisations that have received mid-day meal contracts from the state and push vegetarianism on children who are traditional used to eating eggs and enjoy them. In fact, attendance at school increases on those days that eggs are provided. A group of around 17 organisations in Karnataka have come out to demand that eggs be a part of the mid-day meal.
Claiming to be ‘pure veg’ or sattvik while consuming animal source foods like milk and dairy is hypocrisy at its height, considering meat and milk are all products of the same animal. If the argument for milk and against meat is that the former doesn’t kill the animal and the latter does, then there should be no reason to deny eggs to children because no animal is killed in that process either.
All citizens, irrespective of whether they consume eggs or not, have to join in this struggle to bring in eggs for every day of the week, in government schools. Those centralised organisations that fail to meet these criteria, should be penalised and the contract suspended. In fact their contracts should anyway be suspended and culturally eaten foods should be locally prepared at the school premises. For no reason, should these casteist prejudices around onion, garlic, eggs and other animal source foods, be brought into the school meal. Children should learn about nutrient dense foods both from the foods that they eat at school as well as what is taught to them. Nutrition of children is too crucial to be allowed into the hands of unprincipled, uninformed and unscientific bodies, organisations and institutions.
[Dr Sylvia Karpagam is a public health doctor and researcher. Courtesy: Countercurrents.org, an India-based news, views and analysis website, that describes itself as non-partisan and taking “the Side of the People!” It is edited by Binu Mathew.]