India: Food, community and elections | Bharat Bhushan

 https://www.business-standard.com/opinion/columns/food-community-and-elections-124041500162_1.html

Food, community and elections

 

Bharat Bhushan

 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi accused Opposition leaders of displaying a "Mughal mindset" when videos surfaced of Lalu Yadav, Tejashvi, and Rahul Gandhi bonding over cooking mutton. Not only did he accuse them of deviating from Hindu dharma in the auspicious month of Sawan, but he also alleged that the display of bonhomie was deliberate.

The videos, the PM said, were reflective of the mindset of the "Mughal" invaders "who found perverse joy in the demolition of temples and defiling places of worship.

To dismiss this as election rhetoric would be to forget that creating controversies over meat-eating has been part of communal propaganda for over a century and a half in India.

Today's smear campaign is reminiscent of the strategy said to have been used against CM Stephen, who was contesting against Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1980 from the New Delhi Constituency-I. It was a close contest, and the right-wing organisations backing Vajpayee wanted to take no chances.

According to an apocryphal story, the cadre was deputed to join queues at polling booths and engage voters in conversation, alleging, "Aadmi achha hai par suna hai gau-maans khaata hai (He is a good man but we have heard he eats beef)." The whisper campaign is said to have cost Stephen the election -- losing by a mere 5,045 votes!

Today's political fight is nowhere as close as it was in 1980. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Modi said they are comfortably placed to win the upcoming Lok Sabha election. Then why are such cheap shots directed at the Opposition?

He had also earlier distorted Rahul Gandhi's remark about the Opposition pitted against the power (shakti) of the controversial Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs)—calling it "a well-thought-out attack against Hindu religion," where goddesses are worshipped as Shakti. He labelled those who did not attend the temple inauguration at Ayodhya sinners, exhorting voters, "Ram Navami is coming, remember those who committed this sin."

By drawing parallels between the Congress manifesto and the demands of the pre-Partition Muslim League, two organisations separate in time and context are made to appear similar, divisive and only representatives of sectional Muslim interest.

While such iterations of religious identity will keep the BJP's vote bank consolidated in Northern and Western India, it is even more crucial in states where the BJP is desperate to make inroads. Hindutva is the platform from which the BJP hopes to counter the strong regional sentiment and distinct political culture in these states. Its success has so far been uneven.

The BJP has made major inroads in West Bengal, where its Hindutva rhetoric seems to have struck a chord in a state that has witnessed two partitions on communal lines. The BJP is tapping into that deep and rich seam.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, it won 18 seats, and its vote share was only 3 per cent behind the ruling Trinamool Congress. In the state assembly in 2021, the BJP improved its tally from 3 to 77, becoming the main Opposition party. From Sandeshkhali to Ram Navami celebrations, all incidents and festivals are occasions to polarise the Hindu voters against the 30 per cent Muslim population of the state.

However, the BJP has not been successful in Tamil Nadu and Kerala so far. In Tamil Nadu, the BJP has aggressively argued that the Dravidian political parties and their allies are essentially anti-Hindu. 'Real' Tamil culture is postulated as having been part of a unified Hindu culture till Dravidian atheists hijacked it. This thesis was bolstered by the two Kashi-Tamil Sangamam organised by the Modi government in 2022 and 2023 and articulated in the Prime Minister's election campaign in Tamil Nadu.

The BJP's state president, K Annamalai, has also held forth about reclaiming Tamil culture from the Periyar-Dravida ideology, which he says is anti-Hindu and destroying 'true' Tamil culture and society.

In Kerala, too, the BJP faces a Hindu majority that is largely oriented towards Left and secular parties. The Hindu vote here is divided along caste lines. The marginalised and backward castes support the Communists, while the Congress has a proportion of the upper caste (Nair) Hindu vote and is seen as the party of the Muslim and Christian minorities. The Muslims are represented in North Kerala by the Indian Union Muslim League (IUML).

Kerala politics alternates between the Left Democratic Front (LDF) led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the United Democratic Front (UDF) led by the Congress. The BJP aims to break this cycle by weaning away the Hindu vote.

It tried to woo the Dalit castes through the Kerala Pulaya Mahasabha and Kerala Peoples' Front, an organisation of 21 backward castes, but failed. Nor did its militant agitation against women's entry into Sabarimala Temple amount to much electorally. Now, a propaganda film, "The Kerala Story", is about a Hindu woman being converted to Islam and forced to join the Islamic State. The threat of 'love jihad' and 'narco-jihad' is also being propagated by the BJP to also mobilise the Christian minority.

Contrary to popular belief, the BJP is not bringing out its communal rhetoric because it is apprehensive about election results. It is an offensive strategy. Prime Minister Modi has learnt to successfully twist the meaning of his adversaries' statements and actions. The forms of distortion are sufficiently in tune with communal thinking so that his supporters can easily amplify them and influence voters. It also keeps the communal divide open against attempts by the Opposition to bridge it. 

Most importantly, it is used to increase the BJP's Lok Sabha seats. Like all good businessmen, who consider anything below the previous financial year's profits a 'loss', the BJP wants each election to bring in higher returns.

Prime Minister Modi needs this more than the party because that alone can sustain faith in his charisma. Anything less will be seen as the onset of weakness in his leadership.

Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper

 

India: I am a Jain and Gurgaon meat ban isn’t about my religious sentiments | Vansha Jain (IE, Aug 2, 2022)

The Indian Express,August 2, 2022

Not in my name: I am a Jain and Gurgaon meat ban isn’t about my religious sentiments

Vansha Jain writes: Paryushan Parv is about ridding ourselves of hatred, greed and the pull of the ego. Hurting the livelihoods of traders is about an exclusivist politics
 

Written by Vansha Jain

Meat, even today, is a bit of a taboo — a subject that makes people cringe — within Jain families. While most wince at its mention, there are also some among us who, surreptitiously of course, are known to tuck into the odd chicken tikka. As a child, I used to find this funny because at home we would all be back to eating food with no onion and garlic. My grandmother was a devout Jain and that was reflected in her lifestyle and food habits (she wouldn’t let me even kill mosquitoes). It is well-known that onion and garlic are not consumed in very traditional Jain families, while the injunction around potatoes is both less well-known and practised. Even my devout grandmother loved them and so did our extended family. Her beloved potato was in everything she made. It was only during Paryushan Parv that she would not touch them.

I bring up these dietary memories because today, the public conversation seems to be based on the belief that it is only meat that Jains refrain from consuming. And the ban on the sale of meat in Gurgaon during Paryushan Parv (August 24 to September 1) has only sharpened my doubts around actions taken to protect “religious sentiments”.

If my religious sentiments as a Jain were the sole reason behind the meat ban then, surely, onions, garlic, and potatoes would also be included? Or, in fact, any root vegetable? They are not, for obvious reasons. There would be havoc as the dietary and cultural life of multitudes and the livelihood of those involved in cultivating, transporting and selling these items would be deeply disrupted. But, fundamentally, isn’t the ban on any food – meat, in this case — equally absurd?

This leads me to think that, perhaps, restrictions such as the one in Gurgaon have less to do with my sentiments and more to do with a larger political project. “Pure” and “impure” – think “pure veg restaurant” – have castiest and exclusionary notions attached to them (there is “caste” among Jains too). The ban seems more to do with who the powers-that-be think of as “meat eaters” than respecting those who do not.

Food for me has always been a personal choice. It is about nutrition, taste, pleasure and, yes, culture, and is as varied as all these factors. In a perfect world, there would be no “food shaming”. And now, it is being done in my name, as a Jain.

Many of the people selling meat are Muslim. As the economy struggles back to its feet after the shock of the Covid pandemic, should they suffer another blow to their livelihoods? Is this solidarity with “Jain sentiments” worth the suffering of Muslim and Hindu meat traders? Are Jains just being appeased for a hidden motive? To be honest, most Jains in urban areas don’t not know this ban is being done in their name. Most of them do not think of meat or its products in their daily life — there are enough vegetables to preoccupy them. There is a lot of dietary diversity within Jain families. A small number follow all the restrictions.

Jains have been celebrating their festivals with great fervour without meat bans. Paryushan Parv’s main goal is to remove impurities from within, ridding ourselves of hatred, greed and the pull of the ego. Can we celebrate those values if there is intolerance using our religion as the excuse?

The writer studies political science at Delhi University

India: Authorities and Self-Styled Custodians of Cuture should avoid meddling in culinary matters | Edit, The Tribune

• Editorial, The Tribune, Apr 12, 2022
  

Food fundamentalism
Dangerous trend imperilling our pluralistic society

The clash between two groups of students in a hostel of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) over the serving of non-vegetarian food on Sunday, the day Ram Navami was being celebrated, is symptomatic of the growing communalisation of food habits in our country. It is alleged that members of a student body tried to stop the hostel mess committee from preparing a chicken dish for dinner, even though JNU students are free to choose between non-vegetarian and vegetarian food on Sundays. Violence erupted when the committee members reportedly rejected this unreasonable and intrusive demand. The incident comes in the wake of curbs imposed on the sale of meat in parts of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka during the just-concluded Navratras. Last week, East Delhi Mayor Shyam Sundar Agarwal had not only ordered the closure of meat shops and abattoirs on the last three days of the nine-day festival but also warned of revoking licences of meat sellers if they violated his order. Agarwal, who claims that ‘90 per cent of the people do not consume non-vegetarian food during the Navratras’, also inspected the Ghazipur slaughterhouse on Friday to check for possible violations.

The fact that some right-wing organisations are conducting a campaign against the display of halal certification on food products makes it obvious that a specific community is being targeted on the pretext of what it eats. Shockingly, the forcible imposition of one community’s food choices on others is being condoned or even legitimised by the powers that be. The reluctance of many political and religious leaders to speak out against such blatant highhandedness is making otherisation par for the course. 

This is a dangerous trend for our pluralistic society in which cultural diversity is inseparable from gastronomic variety. The authorities should not only avoid meddling in culinary matters but also deter self-styled custodians of moral and religious values from invading the kitchen. A nation where millions go to sleep every night on an empty stomach needs to get its priorities right. The focus should be on fighting hunger and starvation, not on using intimidatory tactics to make one menu reign supreme.

Imposing Vegetarianism as a Political Agenda | Ram Puniyani

by Ram Puniyani

Recently (December 2021) town planning committee of Ahmadabad Municipal Corporation specifically mentioned that stalls selling non-vegetarian items will not be allowed along public roads and in the 100-meter radius of schools, colleges and religious places. On these lines decisions were also taken by Vadodara, Bhavnagar, Junagadh and Rajkot Municipal bodies. As the hawkers selling these non vegetarian items approached the Court, Court struck down this decision by the authorities.

Surprisingly opposition to non vegetarian food is part of the communal agenda. It is being propagated that non vegetarian food causes violent tendencies. By now it has become a routine for one to hear at different occasions that Muslims are having aggressive tendencies because they consume non-vegetarian food. When probed further the consumption of beef by Muslims is also brought forward. Additionally the point is made that since cow is holy for the Hindus, Muslims at the same time are hurting the sentiments of the Hindus. Lynching on the pretext of cow-beef are a separate chapter by itself.

Two issues have been deliberately intertwined in the social common sense. One is the non vegetarian food causing violent tendencies and the second, the eating of beef by Muslims and thereby hurting the sentiments of Hindus. It is very clear that the definition of non vegetarian food varies from place to place and community to community. Eggs are OK for some vegetarians and strict no for others. Some regard sea food, fish and the like as vegetarian while for others it is non vegetarian food in all sense of the meaning. Today world over roughly more than 80-90% of the population is non vegetarian so to say. As per a survey conducted by IndiaSpend, around 80 per cent of Indian men and 70 per cent of women consume meat weekly.

 While Muslims in India are the object of wrath, the Europeans and Americans etc. do get away easily in this psyche despite having beef-non vegetarian food as the staple diet. In the countries and people who follow the biggest apostle of non violence ever, Lord Gautam Buddha, the consumption of non vegetarian food is no less in quantum. For that matter right here there are innumerable communities for whom beef has been a part of the food habits. Non vegetarianism is prevalent in most communities. Different surveys show that eating non vegetarian food is substantial in most communities including in most states including the one like Gujarat.

There are political over and undertones also in this ‘hate non-vegetarians’ thinking. One can go to the extent of saying that Vegetarianism is also being used as a social and political weapon to browbeat the minority community. No doubt one has the choice of shifting to vegetarianism with full commitment, but to be intolerant to the non vegetarians and to label the Muslims as having violent personality due to the food habits is a part of political campaign, bereft of any scientific-psychological rationale today.

Historically speaking beef-non vegetarian diet was common food in Vedic times (Cow is essentially food, Atho Annam Via Gau, (cow is verily food)). Swami Vivekanand points out “You will be astonished if I tell you that, according to old ceremonials, he is not a good Hindu who does not eat beef. On certain occasions, he must sacrifice a bull and eat it.” (cited in ‘The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda’, Vol 3 (Calcutta: Advaita Ashram, 1997, p. 536.)

D. N. Jha in his book ‘Myth of Holy Cow’ shows that it was with the rise of agricultural society that the restriction was brought in on cow sacrifice by Lord Buddha. The primary goal was to preserve the cattle wealth. The ardent follower of Buddhism, Emperor Ashok, in one of his edicts to the royal kitchen orders that only as many animals and birds be killed as are necessary for the food in the kitchen. This was to put a brake on the animal sacrifice which was part of the Brahminical rituals. It was as a reaction to this that Brahminism came up to project cow as mother to show that it also has concern for cattle and in due course Brahmanism, and politics around it gave her the status of mother.

As far as the violent personality and food is concerned, not much scientific literature is available to prove the correlation of food with the violent tendencies. Violence is a personality trait, in the realm of psychology, which is shaped by familial, social and political circumstances, and keeps changing according to the situations.

There are systems of medicine, the traditional one’s which classify food according to the Satwik (leading to pure, quiet persona), Tamsik (increasing anger) and Rajsik (royal) but it hasn’t been vindicated beyond empirical assertions. Despite some people holding on to human nature correlated to type of food, it is far from being vindicated by any of the modern scientific studies, there is an example of a vegetarian Hitler unleashing the biggest ever genocide.

There are groups of people taking to vegetarianism and latest vogue is that of veganism. The element of religiosity is not mixed up here. Neither should people be intolerant to the ones who consume non vegetarian food. The phenomenon being observed amongst the sections influenced by communalism operates at the level of religiosity. Vegetarianism here is a part of one’s political agenda so to say. As it is being mixed up with religion; it becomes associated with emotions and that’s where the strong rejection of non vegetarians in the neighborhood comes in. Many housing societies refuse those who eat non vegetarian food.

In Ahmadabad I observed that landlord/ladies will barge into the kitchen of their tenants to ensure the strict vegetarianism is adhered to. Now amazingly this has been turned as one more tool of demonize Muslims. Overall as seen in parts of Gujarat vegetarianism is propagated and imposed in such an aggressive way, these orders of Municipalities reflect that. One can certainly say that those propagating vegetarianism in such a fashion is intolerant to the hilt.

 

India - A Base Map on Eating Habits

India: Championing vegetarianism is discriminatory, Edit, The Telegraph

The Telegraph

Editorial

Championing vegetarianism is discriminatory

A contrived sense of difference perpetuates hatred, and hateful practices have trickled down into quasi-official policy

By The Editorial Board

Published 12.10.18

The ‘trickle-down effect’, it seems, seldom works for the good things. Yet it operates most efficiently when the urge is to divide and hurt. A primary school in Wazirabad village in Delhi has been separating its Hindu and Muslim pupils into different sections. The school falls under the aegis of the North Delhi Municipal Corporation, which has promised to look into the matter after being informed of this by a group of teachers. While the bright spot in the induced darkness is the fact that the teachers complained, it is an indication of the successful spread of fear that they wished to remain anonymous. The decision to segregate pupils, reportedly, came from the teacher-in-charge, C.B. Singh Sehrawat, who was installed in place of the previous principal in July. According to this gentleman — he has now been suspended — the reshuffling of sections was a management decision, routinely done to preserve peace, discipline and a good learning environment. Apparently children were ‘squabbling’, not exactly over religion but over food — that is, some were ‘vegetarian’.
The implications of Mr Sehrawat’s comments are clear. Dividing up religious communities on the basis of food assumes that vegetarian food is ‘pure’ and eaters of flesh ‘impure’. Surveys have shown that the strident insistence of the party in power at the Centre and its right-wing siblings that most of India is vegetarian is just a vociferous lie. The championing of vegetarianism is not only discriminatory from the point of view of faith, but is also casteist and region-specific. But it forms the basis of the drive against the trade in beef and leather, to the disadvantage of particular communities and castes. To indoctrinate children in primary school, even by indirect means such as classroom segregation, with this contrived sense of difference is to perpetuate hatred through future citizens. Such hate-based practices have ‘trickled down’ into quasi-official policy, too, where discrimination is more aggressive. Reportedly, applications for registration under the Special Marriage Act, needed for interfaith unions, are being routinely refused in Uttar Pradesh. One such couple had to get married in Calcutta because the registrar in UP had simply not allowed them to apply. The couple are now scared of their future as they return to work. Why are the founding principles of the republic being allowed to be subverted so easily?

India: RSS leader Indresh Kumar says lynchings would cease if people just stopped eating beef

https://www.thequint.com/news/india/lynchings-will-stop-if-people-dont-eat-beef-rss-leader-indresh-kumar

‘Muslim’ meal on Air India to protect Hindus from ‘halal’ by Saeed Naqvi

New Age [ Bangladesh], July 22,2018

ON AN Air India flight from London, the hostess walked down the aisle taking orders for dinner. She leaned over and asked almost conspiratorially.
‘May I serve you your Muslim meal now?’
‘Muslim meal?’ I asked with a start, casting a glance at my equally puzzled wife.
The hostess was embarrassed. A new detail had been added to her hospitality protocol and she was not accustomed to it.
The damage, it turned out, had been done in my office. Responding to a column on dietary preferences, the person responsible for air reservation had hunted high and low for a simple non-vegetarian meal. No such meal was listed. Then he spotted ‘Muslim meal’. The explanatory paragraph clarified that ‘all non vegetarian meals are suitable for Muslims and are prepared in accordance with halal method.’
The journalist in me took over.
‘Fair enough, you have identified us as Muslim, but surely there are others on the flight who are non vegetarians but not Muslim?’
Of course, there are non-vegetarians on Air India but they would not accept the odium of Muslim ancestry simply to indulge their dietary preference. They want to eat meat but as thoroughbred Hindus.
Two consequences follow. Obstacles in the way of non-vegetarianism depresses the demand for non vegetarian food. By the same token Hindu passengers feel they are being short-changed. This was reverse discrimination. They see themselves being pushed to the lower end of the culinary caste system. The demand for non-veg, therefore, gains in decibel levels: we want non veg, that’s for sure, but one which is neither ‘Muslim’ nor ‘halal’.
A three-way dietary division evolves: (1) Hindus not fussy about labels: ‘Muslim’ or ‘halal’ accept whatever is available. (2) Those for whom realisation has been abrupt that what they have been eating for generations was ‘Muslim’ — halal. Ignorance is bliss but not now that enlightenment has come riding on an Air India menu. (3) Simple vegetarians whose tribe, by the way, is growing by leaps and bounds in India as elsewhere face no problem whatsoever.
For the authors of the ‘Muslim meal’ idea, the first category is the most disruptive because it has skewed the process of data collection on how potentially vegetarian or otherwise, India is. This is the key research required for advancing the aspect of Hindutva concerned with promoting non-Muslim dietary practices. If this category can stand its ground despite the disincentive of being called Muslims and halal eaters, this non veg constituency might just stabilize, even grow. God forbid, it may come in the way of full spectrum Hindutva, vegetarianism et al.
The second category is demanding a non vegetarian meal which is unsullied by Muslim-halal connotations. This is a new demand. This clientele does not quite know what it wants; it knows what it does not want in the non-veg arena. It has clearly asked the catering department of Air India a question which is not easy to answer: ‘what non-veg fare can you serve which is not Muslim-halal?’
Here the discussion acquires exactly the potential for which it was initiated — to polarise and, as a trial run, divide the aircraft cabin between vegetarians and non vegetarians who, the perpetrators hope, would not like to be grouped as halal-eating Muslims. The cabin is, in this instance, a microcosm of the meat-mukt India of Hindutva’s dreams.
A quick answer to halal is jhatka, the method of severing the animal’s head with one stroke, favoured by Sikhs. The jhatka-halal debate is custom made for an Arnab Goswami show. Have a devout Sikh, a muscular Mullah and a Bajrang Bali Bhakt, peer out of three windows. Extract all the gory details on jhatka and halal from the spokesmen of two distinct schools of slaughter. A possible walkout by the abstemious Bajrangi may well spur Hindu consolidation on an unprecedented scale.
On a more practical note, the ‘shosha’ (mischief) started by Air India can be put to some constructive use. A new approach to cuisine may involve drastic change: a non veg cuisine developed over centuries as a near art form may have to be jettisoned from official banquets and national carriers. The problem will, of course, arise when lynch mobs on the lookout for a cause, enter restaurants advertising non veg fare. Individual non vegetarians may also incur the wrath of the lynch mobs. In fact a malicious rumour has been floated that the monkeys that have been let loose on Delhi’s citizenry are an animal-loving minister’s project directed against non-veg addicts. The monkeys, says the rumour, are being trained on the Ridge to block entry of meat into non-veg kitchens. The producer of super hit Bajrangi Bhaijan, has threatened to go on hunger strike if the avatars of Bajrang Bali are involved in operations which have anything, negative or positive, to do with meat
The hypocrisy around the cuisine at official banquets at Hyderabad House or even the Rashtrapti Bhawan until the other day, has always bordered on the pathetic. There was an insistence on tasteless fare called Mughlai food at a time when streets named after the dynasty were under assault. The banquets begin with a bogus ‘toast’ of some flat cola. This then is a good time to take a hard look at the rampaging Vegan movement globally. Climate change, animal care, fear of artificially inflated livestock for the table is turning the world to organic, vegetarian food. Jeremy Corbyn, who may well be Britain’s prime minister one day, is a vegetarian.
The core idea of the Nouvelle cuisine Air India should be searching for (and not just creating communal trouble) was available in the ‘prasada’ or ‘offering’ cooked each day in gigantic vessels at the Dargah in Ajmer. The daily fare followed one golden principle: it should be acceptable to widest possible range of pilgrims. The ‘prasada’ was free even of onion, garlic, mushrooms, potatoes or any vegetable which grows underground. This principle is followed in all major Hindu and Sikh places of worship. Somewhere here is the answer to Air India’s quest. To monitor strict vegetarianism in flight, a free ticket may be considered for a representative of the lynch mob on every Air India flight.

Saeed Naqvi is a senior Indian journalist, television commentator, interviewer, and distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi.

What makes Indian vegetarians different from Westerners | Aseem Hasnain & Abhilasha Srivastava

scroll.in - 9 April 2018

What makes Indian vegetarians different from Westerners who have given up meat?

In the West, it’s an act of rebellion. In India, it’s largely driven by conformity to traditional social norms.

Rupak De Chowdhuri/Reuters

Aseem Hasnain  &  Abhilasha Srivastava

To the world, India is often known as the land of Gandhi, spiritualism, and yoga – three sets of beliefs and practices closely associated with some form of vegetarianism. They have played a role in creating the widely held assumption that Indians are vegetarians.
Though India has the largest population of vegetarians worldwide, it is a predominantly meat-eating nation. Nevertheless, vegetarianism is both a powerful norm, and an important performance, both of which are central to a person’s claim to high status in the largely caste-based Indian worldview. As a desired attribute of so-called upper caste groups, vegetarian norms are so desirable that they enforce periodic ritual abstinence even among frequent meat eaters.

Vegetarianism is also present in several societies outside India, especially in the West where a small but increasing number of people aspire to live without consuming meat. The roots of vegetarianism both in India and in the West lie in a comparable time period. Vegetarianism started becoming an aspired value in the South Asian region around the seventh century BCE in Hindu scriptures, and a few centuries later in Jain and Buddhist texts and practices.
In Europe, the earliest mention of the virtues of vegetarianism is found in the works of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras (sixth century BCE), who propagated a meatless diet. In fact, vegetarians in Europe were called Pythagoreans until the founding of The Vegetarian Society in Ramsgate, England in 1847, and the American Vegetarian Society in New York City in 1850. However, similarities between Indian and western vegetarianism end here. While vegetarianism has been popular in India for a much longer period than in the West, the more important difference is that vegetarianism is led by, and leads to, very different worldviews in both places.

West: Vegetarianism for social justice

Although 19th century vegetarianism in Britain and the US was rooted in the Bible Christian Church, it has evolved in these two countries primarily through secular social movements. Four broad values have driven these movements: ethics and morality, environmental concerns, animal rights, and health and food safety. Barring the last one, the first three concerns are comparatively altruistic, and oriented towards a shared public good. Participants in vegetarian social movements transform themselves both in thought and behaviour, by changing not only their belief about food but also everyday consumption patterns. This is an extraordinary transformation because eating habits are one of the most resilient to change, especially those that involve excluding previously consumed food items completely.
In the West, to be a vegetarian is also to be against the general norms about food – it is often seen as a rebellious act opposed to long-standing cultural norms and expectations. Therefore, vegetarianism in the West is a lifestyle that involves a deep commitment to self-transformation, breaking away from everyday dietary preferences, going against the forces of socialisation, and rebelling against cultural norms – all for the sake of newly discovered ethics and concerns.
There is an interesting spillover of these broad concerns when participants of vegetarian movements are often advocates in other campaigns – such as anti war, anti pollution, anti nuclear, and anti corporate movements. In effect, vegetarianism in the West is part of the broader platform of social justice from which various ethical, humanist, and egalitarian movements emerge and evolve. A person in the West becomes a vegetarian through a deliberate process, by questioning received knowledge about consumption, and by painfully transforming one’s day-to-day behaviour. Therefore, a vegetarian individual in the West is most likely to be a progressive figure oriented towards broader ethics of social justice.

Brahmanism and vegetarianism in India

In contrast, vegetarianism in contemporary India displays an arguable continuity with dietary traditions and beliefs central to Brahmanism and the caste system where communities deemed to be upper caste, barring a few, maintain vegetarianism and the so-called lower castes are free of such restrictions.
Vegetarianism evolved in modern India through two pathways. The first is through conformity with Brahmanism and caste sensibilities, especially visible within the traditionally vegetarian upper castes. The second involves the adoption of vegetarianism through the influence of myriad religo-spiritual cults, headed by gurus, which have mushroomed across India over the past few decades. While some of these cults are standalone institutions with only local appeal, others have greater influence based on their franchisee business models that allows them to be present across several regions. Cable TV and social media have added to the outreach of these cults and their influence.
Such cults purportedly facilitate the elevation of ordinary mortals to salvation-ready entities through a set of rituals that often includes vegetarianism. While their followers could belong to any caste, they are especially appealing to the so-called lower caste communities that aspire to climb the caste hierarchy through the well-known process of Sanskritisation. Thus vegetarianism becomes an attractive mechanism for upward social mobility in a rigid caste hierarchy. Although these neo-vegetarians follow an innovative path by changing their dietary preferences, the fact that they follow traditionally established Brahminical practices undermines the spirit of innovation. Vegetarianism in modern India is thus largely driven by conformity to traditional social norms above any other motivation.

The many shades of being vegetarian in India: a popular forward on social media.

India: Vegetarianism without social justice

Traditional Indian vegetarianism is also unique in relation to ethical and moral concerns. Although Brahminical vegetarianism is rooted in the ethics of animal welfare, the absence of any restriction on milk products makes it substantively different from animal welfare concerns in the West. In fact, the vegetarian diet in India places a premium on milk and milk products such as cheese, butter and yogurt, and this has opened the doors for the industrial use of animals unquestioningly. Thus, the concern for animal welfare among Indian vegetarians is much weaker than in the West. Finally, the discourse of vegetarianism is so completely monopolised by the notions of ritual purity and pollution that concerns for the environment and food safety have almost no space on the agenda.
This brings us to the question: what kind of a person is the Indian vegetarian individual? A traditionally vegetarian person in India is the opposite of all that her counterpart in the West is. For one, a person is largely born into vegetarianism in India. The consumptive life of a vegetarian in India is based on the complete acceptance of received knowledge about food taboos especially meat. Therefore being a vegetarian in India is not as deliberate as in the West, but is mainly about reproducing everyday norms. Couple this uncritical norm reproduction with the strong connections that vegetarianism has with Brahminism and caste sensibilities to see how vegetarianism is central to making or maintaining boundaries in an unequal society. For all practical purposes, vegetarianism in India is about maintaining the caste system, as well as about reinforcing perceptions of superiority and inferiority of caste based groups, based on the avoidance of meat.
While a vegetarian American might treat the food preferences of a meat eater with harmless contempt, in India a vegetarian’s scorn for meat-based diets and meat-eating individuals has real consequences. This takes place through social distancing and exclusion based on the notions of ritual purity or pollution that are inherent to the caste system. The vertical nature of caste-based society in India ensures that vegetarianism is not simply a food preference, but a pathway that shapes one’s life outcomes through social or material rewards and punishments. In other words, vegetarianism in India is as much about the maintenance of social inequality, than it is about anything else. Thus, a common vegetarian individual in India is most likely a conservative figure generally detached from the broad ideas of social egalitarianism, and social justice.
Aseem Hasnain teaches sociology and Abhilasha Srivastava teaches economics and interdisciplinary courses at Bridgewater State University, Massachusetts.

“Cow vigilantism” in India | The Economist

Often just an excuse to exacerbate tensions between religious communities

The Economist explains

Feb 15th 2018

by A.A.K. | MUMBAI

https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2018/02/economist-explains-2

Video: Crackdown on beef now extended to all forms of non-vegetarian foods in NOIDA, Uttar Pradesh | Newsclick

Mad Cow Disease Strikes - Shutting of Meat shops, Lynch mobs in the name of Cow protection - Select Editorials

http://www.sacw.net/article13200.html

India: Meat under attack: Authorities must not encourage food bigotry or harass legitimate businesses | Editorial, The Times of India, April 3, 2017

 Editorial, The Times of India, April 3, 2017

Meat under attack: Authorities must not encourage food bigotry or harass legitimate businesses

Last week Gujarat adopted a draconian law against cow slaughter, making it punishable with a 14-year jail term. This is on the heels of a clampdown on abattoirs in UP. Over in the Jharkhand capital, licenses of mutton and chicken shops haven’t been renewed. Voices are growing from Hindutva organisations in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and other BJP-ruled states for a blanket closure of meat shops. Taken together there are worrying signs of a rise in food bigotry, cow vigilantism, harassment of legitimate meat businesses and competitive fundamentalism.
It’s important to note that cow slaughter was banned in all these states even before the current NDA government took office. Gujarat for example had imposed a complete ban not just on slaughtering but also on transporting cow and progeny in 2011. Today if it were simply a matter of improving the implementation of all laws, incidentally including such bans, it wouldn’t necessarily be such an adverse development. A clampdown on illegal slaughterhouses would be welcome if it meant a more modern, compassionate and hygienic meat industry.
Unfortunately this is not the message that goes out when Gujarat chief minister Vijay Rupani says he wants to make Gujarat vegetarian, his government decrees veritable life sentences and Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh talks of hanging those who kill cows. Or when legitimate UP enterprises that account for over half of India’s $5 billion worth of buffalo meat exports are threatened. It’s not just precious foreign exchange but lakhs of jobs that are at stake in an economy characterised by jobless growth. Even if one wants to institute bans on cow slaughter, this cannot be equated to the taking of a human life. Such conflations amount to religious fundamentalism which will breed conflict and violence – Pakistan next door is a good example of how it plays out. The vigilantism and violence seen from Dadri to Una could now get worse, endangering social stability and harmony.
Some months ago Prime Minister Narendra Modi had come down heavily on such vigilantes, calling out the majority of ‘gau rakshaks’ as anti-socials who proclaim themselves cow protectors only to cover up their misdeeds. Yet, in conflicting signals, legitimate meat businesses are suffering and non-vegetarianism is facing an aggressive Hindutva attack. Both Centre and BJP-ruled states need to send a more coherent message, about respecting individual liberties and protecting legal businesses.

India: One of Lucknow’s most iconic eateries, the century-old Tunday Kababi is the latest victim of the meat crackdown

UP: Lucknow's legendary Tunday Kababi downs it shutters as meat crackdown intensifies

Dozens of shops and slaughterhouses in the state have been raided and sealed since Adityanath became the chief minister on March 15.

https://scroll.in/latest/832584/up-lucknows-legendary-tunday-kababi-downs-it-shutters-as-meat-crackdown-intensifies

India: At Banaras Hindu University, boys can have non-veg food but not girls

National Herald

Photo courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

The Banaras Hindu University campus in Varanasi

At BHU, boys can have non-veg food but not girls

This is just one of the several bizarre decisions taken by BHU VC Girish Chandra Tripathi—who boasts of his association with the RSS—exposed by JD(U) MP Ali Anwar Ansari in the Rajya Sabha on Monday

NH Political Bureau

Feb 07th 2017, 02.04 PM

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Non-vegetarian food is not allowed in the girls’ hostels at Banaras Hindu University, a central university, while there are no such restrictions for boys, said Janata Dal (United) Member of the Rajya Sabha, Ali Anwar Ansari during Zero Hour on Monday. The issue was raised during Zero Hour in the Rajya Sabha on Monday with no response from the Government

There was no response from the Treasury benches even as the MP listed several indiscretions of the VC. The MP drew attention of the HRD Ministry and sought the Government’s intervention while citing some of them.

• Prospectus of the BHU holds out the promise of a 24-hour cyber library. But a year ago the VC stopped the library from functioning at night. Some students sat on a dharna in protest and nine of them, most of them Dalits, OBCs and from minority communities, were expelled from the college.
• A scuffle between two groups of students led the university to file an FIR and invite the police to the campus. Several students have been arbitrarily debarred from appearing in examinations and guardians of several others are being called and threatened with expulsion of their wards.
• Besides the bar on non-veg food, girls at BHU are being prevented from using mobile phones after 9 pm. They are also subjected to curfew hours and asked to report to their hostels before 8 pm.
• There is no Wi-fi (Internet connection) in the girls’ hostel.
• Students are being forced to submit an affidavit at the time of admission and commit that they would not take part in any protest or agitation in the campus.

While the MP also tried to raise the issue of students’ unrest in JNU, he was not allowed to do so for paucity of time.

India: DN Jha’s ‘The Myth of the Holy Cow’ examined facts, and its detractors didn’t like that

scroll.in - 6 Nov 2016

Freedom of expression

It’s easy to see why the Right wanted this book about Indians’ beef-eating history to be banned

DN Jha’s ‘The Myth of the Holy Cow’ examined facts, and its detractors didn’t like that.

Satyavrat KK

Right next to my school in Chennai, there used to be a hole-in-the-wall eatery that served as a rite of passage for most of us who’d hit high school. It resembled more a shotgun shack rather than a respectable dining establishment, the kitchen walls seemed covered in soot, so that you could hardly see what was going on in there. The only sensory stimuli was aural, provided by a furious wok and a spatula. The menu was limited, and everybody more or less ordered the same thing, a plate of beef fry along with a beef fried rice.
In retrospect, I don’t think it constituted a fine culinary experience, but there certainly was some subversive relish in the whole activity, and while beef isn’t as ubiquitous in Tamil Nadu as it is in Kerala, it wasn’t all that hard to come by in Chennai. By the time a few years had passed, I had been benumbed of the novelty of these clandestine beef runs and was wholly converted, eating the bovine ilk at any given opportunity.
It was at this juncture that I found myself in Delhi, hankering for beef in a city that offered few such oases. I was directed to a Malayali mess in Hauz Khas, one where the beef fry was the only item on the menu written in Malayalam. I proceeded to place my order in what I felt was an acceptable amplitude for a mess, only to be met with a circumspect stare from the waiter, who trotted off to the kitchen hastily and returned to drop it on my table with the gravitas of a Cold War era dead drop.
In 2010, when I was a university student in Bangalore, the Karnataka government threatened to pass a new law, enacted in “The Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Bill 2010”, but this was eventually rejected by the former governor of the state HR Bhardwaj, who felt the Bill “adversely affects lakhs of people’s lives and lacks legislative competence.” It was around this time that I first heard the historian and academic DN Jha’s name in passing for the first time.

History, not hate

Jha’s Myth Of The Holy Cow was never intended to be provocative. It was merely an academic inquiry into the historical beef-eating dietary habits on the Subcontinent, one that was buttressed with ample evidence from ancient texts and sources. However, many publishers refused to take on the heat of brining it out, and after it was finally published in 2001 by Matrix Books, it was received with the usual symphony of death threats and brickbats from the fundamentalist Hindutva right.
The book promptly faced a court injunction, and would eventually resurface only in 2009, published this time by Navayana with a pop art cover whose appealing shelf presence would probably betray the sober, academic content of the book itself. Jha’s central premise is that the practice of eating beef is hardly a foreign concept brought to India by Islamic and Christian influences, and that people from the Vedic era not only ritually sacrificed the cow, but also relished its meat.
Jha meticulously brings this out by drawing our attention to various ancient texts – the Vedas, epics like the Ramayana, and Buddhist and Jain scriptures. Jha also charts out society’s transformation from a pastoralist, nomadic group to settled agriculturalists, where the the status of the cow was elevated to that a beast of burden.
However, the cow hadn’t yet become holy, with neither the Laws of Manu (which prohibit eating cows but condones their slaughter by Brahmins) nor the concept of ahimsa in Buddhist and Jain thought elevating the animal to a hallowed status. Beef-eating eventually became taboo in the medieval period among upper caste Hindus, but the cow was yet to be canonised, as this happened much later in the 19th century, when various cow protection groups galvanised themselves on this nebulous notion of a shared identity.
As Jha puts it “The holiness of the cow is elusive. For there has never been a cow goddess, nor any temple in her honour. Nevertheless the veneration of this animal has come to be viewed as a characteristic trait of modern day non-existent monolithic ‘Hinduism’ bandied about by the Hindutva forces.”

Unholy nexus

In the past couple of years, we have seen a Muslim man murdered on suspicion of storing beef in UP, two Muslim cattle herders lynched in public in Jharkhand, and Dalits flogged for carrying cow carcasses in Gujarat. To understand the morbid paranoia that has taken over the Hindu right, we must look to the words of one of its seers, a Chitpavan Brahmin and former sarsanghchalak of the RSS, MS Golwalkar: “The expression ‘communalism of the majority’ is totally wrong and misconceived. In a democracy the opinion of the majority has to hold sway in the day-to-day life of the people. As such it will be but proper to consider the practical conduct of the life of the majority as the actual life of the national entity.”
We’ve never come closer to reaching Golwalkar’s perverse ideal in the history of the Indian republic than now, but the seeds of this hysteria have always been around. To cite a small instance in the realm of art, take Girish Karnad’s masterful Tabbaliyu Neenade Magane, a film adaptation of SL Bhyrappa’s novel of the same name. Here we see an irate mob of villagers gathering around the feudal mansion of Kalinga Gowda, whose American wife Hilda orders the slaughter of the household cow and eventually eats it, which results in their being outcast by the community.
In direct opposition to Golwalkar’s parochial idea of the republic stands BR Ambedkar, whose insightful and highly readable essay, Untouchability and the Dead Cow, finds it way to the Navayana edition of Jha’s book. As the chief framer of the Indian Constitution, he managed to slip in the crucial Article 29 and 30 to counter such unsophisticated partisan instincts. It reads: “Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same.”
Ambedkar further elucidated this deliberate inclusion by saying, “It is also used to cover minorities which are not minorities in the technical sense, but which are nonetheless minorities in the cultural and linguistic sense…if there is a cultural minority which wants to preserve its language, its script and its culture, the State shall not by law impose upon it any other culture which may be either local or otherwise.”. Ultimately, the Malayali heading to the Kerala mess for a beef fry in Delhi is far more in line with the Constitution than the man stoking the tinderbox of cow protection in his community over what his neighbour is allegedly storing in the freezer.

India: Cow Vigilantism Is Tearing Apart India’s Social Fabric (Prem Shankar Jha)

The Wire - 24 October 2016

Cow Vigilantism Is Tearing Apart India’s Social Fabric
By Prem Shankar Jha

Banning cow slaughter is a goal of the RSS and this has led to the emergence of hundreds of groups that go around attacking Dalits and Muslims.

Screengrab of the Dalit men being hit with iron rods in Una.

It took the Supreme Court two months to agree to hear a petition asking for a directive to states to take stern action against vigilante groups seeking to enforce bans on cow slaughter. In the meantime, thousands of such groups, armoured by self-righteousness and the covert protection of the state, have continued to prey upon Muslims and Dalits across the length and breadth of the country. In the process, they have begun to tear apart the social fabric of the country, built painstakingly over two millennia.

Muslims who live in the rest of India have no secure haven to which they can flee, so they have to grin and bear it. Dalits and sections of the OBCs, who have traditionally lived on skinning dead cattle and selling the hides to the leather tanneries, are in a similar plight. But Kashmiri Muslims do have a haven, so their recent actions provide a barometer for the stress that these communities are under.

A respected writer and publicist, who had purchased a flat in Haryana as a refuge from the harsh Kashmir winters, confided to me that he did not intend to come this year because he “no longer feels safe”. He went on the ask me, “Suppose I have a dispute with my neighbour and he reports that I am keeping beef in my home, who will come to my rescue?”. A successful young industrialist told me: “We were living in Delhi during the militancy, and my son was studying in the Sardar Patel Vidyalaya. In 2012 we believed that normality had returned, and came back to Kashmir. Today my son, who is 12, is asking me questions about our association with India that I do not know how to answer”.

It does not need much knowledge of history to understand why the RSS’ obsession with banning cow slaughter is a short cut to national suicide, for Indian history is replete with examples of how rulers’ attempts to interfere with the cultural, religious or social practices of their subjects has led to the fall of empires.

Most historians agree that the centralisation of power necessitated by Emperor Asoka’s attempt to enforce his edicts banning animal slaughter, and a variety of other localised social practices, laid the ground for the revolts that ended the Mauryan empire less than half a century after his death.

Aurungzeb, the last of the great Moghuls, learned this lesson 400 years ago when his largely Rajput army began to melt away after he introduced discriminatory taxes and other measures aimed at the Hindus. That proved to be the beginning of the end of the end of the Mughal empire.

The British too learned to leave this fabric intact the hard way when Lord Dalhousie’s Doctrine of Lapse, which denied the right of succession to the adopted children of Hindu rulers, helped to trigger a nationwide revolt in 1857.

This understanding was ingrained in the DNA of the pre-independence Congress party. It explains why the party withdrew its opposition to partition in March 1947. As it said poignantly in its Lahore resolution that year, it considered this to be the only way to stop the spread of the insidious poison of communalism that was ‘tearing the social fabric of the country apart’.

And, finally, it explains why the NDA under Atal Behari Vajpayee never raised the issue. Why, then, is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP bent on taking India to collective suicide? The knee-jerk explanation is that Hindus worship the cow. But the real answer is to be found in the quiet retrogression into ignorance, dogma and prejudice that has occurred within the Sangh parivar after Vajpayee’s defeat in 2004.

As has happened within European ideological movements that have sought power through the ballot box, the Sangh parivar had been racked by a struggle between its parliamentary wing, which is the BJP, and its organisational wing, which is headed by the RSS. In 1998-2004, the parliamentary wing, under Vajpayee and his deputy prime minister L.K. Advani, was very much in the ascendant. Today it is the RSS that is calling the shots.

Banning cow slaughter had been a major goal of the RSS since its inception in the 1920s. But until Modi became prime minister it had failed to find a leader in the BJP who would make it a part of his national policy. This was because of the relentless pressure exerted by the simple majority voting system upon the party to dilute its ideology in order to broaden its voter base sufficiently to win a majority in the Lok Sabha.

The need to do this became apparent in 1991 when, even after eight years of relentless stoking of Hindu chauvinism over the need to shift the Babri Masjid and build a Ram temple on the site where it stood, the BJP secured only 20.4% of the national vote and won only 120 out of 544 seats in parliament.

Vajpayee and Advani, therefore, set out to ‘secularise’ the BJP by inducting retired civil servants, army officers and able politicians from other political parties, and to enter into coalitions with political parties opposed to the Congress.

This strategy brought the NDA to power in 1998 and again after a snap election in 1999. On the pretext of having to accommodate the BJP’s coalition partners, Vajpayee kept diehard Hindu ideologues favoured by the RSS out of the cabinet. But the latter did not take this lying down.

Within weeks of the formation of the government in 1998, they raised a hue and cry against conversions to Islam and Christianity, and began a campaign to re-convert Muslims and Christians back to Hinduism. Two RSS-offshoots, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal, began to attack Christian priests and nuns, and burn or vandalise village churches, daring Vajpayee to take action against them.

Vajpayee roundly criticised the lawlessness and even undertook a fast to force state governments to take stern action, but fought shy of criticising the RSS directly. The conflict came to a head when cadres of the Bajrang Dal set fire to the SUV in which Graham Staines, a greatly loved missionary, and his two sons were sleeping, roasting them to death.

Vajpayee took immediate and severe action. Mass arrests followed and within three years the main culprit was in prison for life while his accomplices had received lesser sentences. He also called a conclave of the BJP’s coalition partners and set up a National Coordination Committee supposedly to coordinate policy across the country but in reality as a counterweight to the RSS. The stratagem succeeded and gave India one of its best governments since independence. But the radical elements in the RSS never forgave Vajpayee for his “treachery”.

They took their revenge when the NDA suffered a surprise defeat in 2004. As two of the BJP’s coalition partners later conceded, the single main cause was the 2002 communal carnage in Ahmadabad that Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, had been either unable or unwilling, to prevent.

But the RSS insisted that the cause was Vajpayee’s betrayal of the ‘Hindutva’ ideology. A host of second-tier leaders of the party, who had resented being sidelined by the persons inducted from the outside, also joined in the attack.

Nine years later they unceremoniously pushed aside Advani and chose Modi to lead them into the 2014 election.

After his victory, Modi ended the schism between the parliamentary and organisational wings of the Sangh parivar by making Amit Shah, a staunch RSS man, the president of the BJP. He also ordered his ministers to meet party committees, composed of the BJP’s rank and file and the RSS to “inform” them of the initiatives and achievements of their ministries.

Significantly, Modi did not include a single one of Vajpayee’s seasoned cabinet members in his government. From then on it is the RSS that has set the agenda for the country.

In the past two years, this message has filtered down to every branch and cell of the Sangh parivar in the country. Within days of Modi’s victory, RSS cadres had resuscitated ghar wapisi and love jihad and begun to encourage Jats in Muzaffarnagar to “take revenge” on another community for “raping their sisters”. Modi chose to remain silent. Then, during the run-up to the state assembly elections in Bihar in October 2015, the RSS turned the cow vigilantes loose on the country. It gave no central directive – just a quiet nod to ‘do what comes naturally’. The results were bizarre: in one UP town, a bespectacled male RSS activist, covered head to toe in a Muslim woman’s burkha, was caught running away after he had thrown beef into a temple. In Ranchi, pork was thrown into a two mosques and beef into two temples on the same day. Only a prompt announcement by the police chief that these were the acts by agents provocateurs prevented a backlash.

In the last one year, gau raksha has become a state gifted passport to tens of thousands of lumpen goons to vent their sadism upon the poorest and most helpless people of this country. In towns and villages across the country groups of young men have begun to roam the streets and country roads looking for people transporting meat, live cattle, or the hides of cattle that have died of starvation. An estimated 200 such groups are believed to be active in Delhi alone. Another 200 or more have sprung up in Gujarat.

Their usual mode of operation is to stop trucks carrying livestock or hides, accuse the owners of having slaughtered cattle, beat them up and release them after they hand over all the cash they possess.

These gau rakshaks take pride in their work. Like ISIS and Jabhat al Nusra in Iraq and Syria, they have taken to posting videos of their beatings on the internet. One beautifully shot clip shows jeans and T-shirt clad young men mercilessly beating bare-backed, dirt poor men and boys who are on their knees begging for mercy first on a busy thoroughfare, and later beating them even more savagely at a secluded place outside the town. The video, which was shot at Una in Gujarat, is silent, so one can see the victims begging for mercy but not hear their screams and begging voices lest this make them human. Instead, we are soothed by soft western piano music as we watch.

Till barely a month ago all but a few of the victims of cow vigilantism were Muslims. So, perhaps not coincidentally, Modi maintained a studied silence. He made an exception only when the murder of a Muslim plumber, Mohammad Akhlaq, by a mob led by the sons of the principal election agent in the constituency of union tourism minister, just 40 kms from Delhi, made national headlines. But he did so only after eight days of silence, at an election rally in distant Bihar that attracted next to no attention. He did not visit the family of the deceased and did not chide his minister for dismissing Akhlaq’s death as an “accident”, i.e not a crime. Not surprisingly in most of the publicised cases of vigilantism that have followed, the police has booked the victims for breaking the ban on beef and not the vigilantes. Akhlaq’s family has not been spared either.

Modi broke his silence and condemned the cow vigilantes unequivocally only after the Una video went viral on Youtube. He did so because the victims in it were not Muslims but Dalits, who make up a seventh of India’s population and because the incident had aroused a wave of anger in the Dalits of Gujarat, that was threatening the BJP’s base in Modi’s home state.

“Criminals have turned cow protection into a business, and have given this noble task a bad name”, he said to a packed hall in Delhi a week after the incident. Two days after that he repeated his charge and said “Shoot me if you must but do not shoot my Dalit brothers”. But in neither speech did he make a single conciliatory gesture towards the principal victims of the vigilantes, the Muslims.

More recent remarks by him and home minister Rajnath Singh show that he has begun to have second thoughts about the utility of cow vigilantism. Instead of mobilising Hindus behind the BJP, it is causing a consolidation of lower caste Hindu and Muslim opinion against the government, which could cost it dearly in two important state assembly elections next year.

But his disapproval has come far too late to mend the tears the vigilantes have made in the social fabric of the country. The genie of communalism is out of the bottle and the country will have to live with it.

Biryani Policing and the Leadership Crisis in the Indian Police Service (Basant Rath)

The  Wire

Biryani Policing and the Leadership Crisis in the Indian Police Service

By Basant Rath on 04/10/2016 

Beyond the safety of minorities and biryani policing in Haryana, the IPS are under an obligation to act like leaders, not as mere passengers.

Representative image. Credit: Reuters

Welcome to Haryana, the state where the maximum sentence for a convicted rapist is three years less than for a cow slaughtering offence and where molesting a woman is a lesser offence than being in possession of beef. At the moment, that is. The state comes in second – after Uttar Pradesh – in terms of number of police complaints filed.
The state has seen large-scale riots (the Jat quota stir), rising atrocities against Dalits (the burning of two Dalit children), communal attacks against minorities (the Ballabgarh riots), female infanticide and frequent attacks on women. It has been recording more than 67 cases per day against women. Here, crimes against scheduled castes increased from 493 in 2013 to 830 in 2014.
This is the state that requested Prakash Singh, the retired IPS officer who is a living legend of our times, to head a fact-finding probe into the Jat quota agitation last February, later asking him to stop working on his second report focussing on “recommending reforms” in the system.
Singh’s first report indicted a sizeable section of Haryana’s bureaucracy and its police, the mighty IAS and IPS, and their blue-eyed and deep-pocketed men, for deserting their posts and failing to respond to warnings from the Centre, which offended the alpha males of the bureaucracy. Some ultra-powerful politicians in Haryana also took umbrage because their butlers had been censured. The Haryana home department letter said that Singh no longer needed to undertake the originally mandated study of the police organisation and structures.
Haryana is also the state that introduced biryani policing as a new wing of law enforcement and added a new phrase to our vocabulary. Last month, just days ahead of Bakr Eid, the Haryana police in the Muslim-dominated Mewat district collected samples of biryani from street vendors to test the meat used. So the Haryana police, equipped with its dismal record in tackling crimes against women, Dalits and minorities and preventing massive riots, was tasked with the all-important job of sniffing beef from biryani cooked for Eid in small street stalls.
Not just Haryana
Haryana is not a stray case. Let’s go national. Last year in September, in UP’s Dadri, a mob of cow protectors entered 50-year-old Mohammad Akhlaq’s home after a local temple had broadcast rumours that the Muslim family had killed a cow and consumed its meat. They murdered Akhlaq and injured his son. This incident was followed by a spate of public beatings of alleged beef eaters and traders by cow vigilante groups, including the murder of Jammu and Kashmir trucker Zahid, the hanging of two Muslim cattle traders in Jharkhand, the murder of Noman (a 20-year-old from UP) in Himachal Pradesh, the harassment of Muslim women in Madhya Pradesh and the public flogging of Dalits in Una, Gujarat, by cow protection gangs. Many such incidents of cow vigilantism are reported (and many others go unreported) in the local and national press, and most target minorities and Dalits in an attempt to terrorise them in the name of the cow protection.
At the moment, 24 out of 29 states in India have various regulations prohibiting either the slaughter or sale of cows. Arunachal Pradesh, Kerala (animals above ten years), Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura are the states where there are no restrictions on cow slaughter. Assam, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal allow the slaughter of cattle with a certificate. Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Bihar, Goa and Odisha have banned cow slaughter, but allow the slaughter of other cattle with a certificate. The rest of India bans the slaughter of all cattle.
Laws that criminalise centuries old food and drinking habits give a lot of discretion to the police officers working at the police station level. How many of them owe their current postings and future prospects to the local MLAs and MPs is not a query that needs a high IQ score to answer. How these police officials use their rule-mandated discretion to serve the interests of their careerist police leaders and investment-savvy political mentors can be seen in Gujarat and Bihar. The political economy of prohibition ensures that smuggling and illicit sale of alcohol are rampant in these states. ‘Folder’ is popular slang used in Gujarat to refer to a bootlegger who delivers alcohol on demand. The corrupt among the police in Gujarat owe a lot of their prosperity to these ‘folders’. It is not for nothing that Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Mizoram and Tamil Nadu have previously enforced but later repealed prohibition.
Enforcement of the beef ban follows a similar political trajectory. In India, most cow owners live in villages and on the fringes of cities. The poor cattle owners in India, Hindu or otherwise, sell their old cows because they can no longer afford to keep the unproductive cattle. What happens to these animals after their sale can be gauged from the fact that there are more than 36,000 legal and 30,000 illegal slaughterhouses in the country. India’s $2 billion leather export industry depends on 4,000 tanneries and leather-goods factories; they depend on cattle, including cows, for their survival and prosperity.
The emergence of biryani policing as a new wing of law enforcement shows that India has a structural problem. What is legal in Kerala can be illegal in Haryana. Beef eating was legal in Haryana in 2014. It is illegal in 2016. What has changed? With the numbers on its side, a ruling dispensation can criminalise an act that is perfectly legal in some other parts of the country. Muslims, even if they account for 77% of the population of a district (as in Mewat), can’t eat beef because of a politically motivated law. The discretionary powers of the police make them unaccountable when they act upon malicious intelligence inputs about what is being cooked in private citizens’ kitchens. The leather export industry in India that uses cowhides is thriving. But private armies of cow vigilantes can harass, humiliate and kill citizens of this country.
The concept of citizenry, the constitutionally mandated relationship between the state (as different from the government of the day) and an individual citizen of the country (minus the intermediate identity markers of religion, region, caste and gender) is what makes this young country and old civilisation what it is. This relationship is the foundation of our constitution in the context of democratic governance. This is the foundation of the idea of India. Biryani policing as a model of governance has exposed the fragile nature of this relationship in Haryana and other places afflicted with the twin diseases of private policing and unfettered discretionary police powers.
The IPS’s involvement
Now a few questions for the police leadership of this country – the members of the IPS. Which sections of the penal code and Criminal Procedure Code allow the police to enter kitchens of private citizens on information given by other private citizens? What if the complaint is found to be false? Who is responsible for what the ‘beef suspects’ and their families go through in the local communities? What about the hard fact of the police raids making them vulnerable to violence by politico-economically motivated cow vigilantes for life? How are police officials acting on politically motivated intelligence inputs and carrying out biryani raids punished in the event of their unsuccessful raids? Where are the laws and standard operating procedures to make the erring police officials accountable for their crimes?
How do the IPS contribute to this mess? Let’s count the ways.
One, India’s policing system is collapsing under the burden of rule-based, but unaccounted, discretionary powers available to police officials at the police station level. In case of politically motivated police raids and arrests, the lives of innocent citizens and their family members get destroyed beyond redemption and nothing happens to erring police officials. The IPS play ‘office-office’ and claim sainthood for themselves, individually and collectively. They ask for legally mandated police reforms, but refuse to stand up to the criminals among the police.
Two, the police in India has a math problem. Our police organisations are definitely majoritarian in their demographic profile. The all-India figure (minus Jammu and Kashmir) for the percentage of Muslim policemen and women is four, for Delhi it is two, for Maharashtra it is one, for UP 4.8, while for Bihar it is 4.5 and Rajasthan it is 1.2. Apart from having a low representation of Dalits and Muslims, most police organisations are divided along caste lines. Police organisations in the country are characterised by a low representation of women as well. The national average is less than 5%. The IPS claim they are helpless in these matters. But the usual mad-rush among the alpha males of the IPS for the post of the police chief shows that they believe they can add value to the functioning of their respective state cadres. The tragedy is that their optimism doesn’t extend to the diversity of the workforce.
Three, more often than not, police leaders perform their duties in politically strategic ways over what is necessarily legally correct. Conspiracies between police officers and their political mentors are a hard fact. The IPS lobby ensures that criminal elements among the police don’t get punished for their commissions and omissions. Attesting to this is the fact that no police officer – IPS or state cadre – was punished for dereliction of duty in cases like the 1984 Delhi riots or the 2002 Gujarat riots. The latest addition is the Haryana Jat agitation in which the state lost properties worth Rs 20,000 crores as state police leaders stood idle on the sidelines and were busy protecting their chairs.
Four, the police organisations in the country are caught between two misdirected segments of the polity. They have to bear the brunt of the increased might of the mob and anti-social elements, backed either by the establishment or by those opposed to it. The former uses the police to remain in power, while the latter want the police to fail so that they can use the resulting chaos to damn the government. When the former and the latter belong to the same political dispensation, they use the police as match-fixers. How the police handled cow vigilante groups in various states is a case in point. In the process, police accountability becomes a pipedream in our democracy. And the IPS are a part of the problem.
Five, the IPS refuse to realise the fact that police organisations of the country, in their present compositions and structures, are not capable of giving the masses a secular, democratic policing-related delivery system. And that the conventional ‘unity-in-diversity’ model tom-tomed by the National Police Academy believes in an India dominated by its majority community, the Hindus. All other religions, the argument goes, must “assimilate” to India’s Hindu core, accepting as a matter of first principle that the Hindus are the chief architects of the Indian nation and also its superior citizens. Let’s take a specific example. For Hindu nationalist ideologues, the 2002 Gujarat communal violence was an ideological victory. In a formal resolution, the RSS, the ideological and organisational centerpiece of Hindu nationalism, said: “Let the minorities understand that their real safety lies in the goodwill of the majority”.
Beyond the safety of minorities and biryani policing in Haryana, the IPS are under an obligation to act like leaders, not as mere passengers. Their credibility is at stake, both on the crime-ridden streets of New Delhi and in the 33% of districts that face some sort of armed conflict against the state. Accepting this will be a welcome start. Beyond the world of badakhana and darbar and Powerpoint presentations. Ameen.
Basant Rath is in the Indian Police Service (2000, Jammu and Kashmir) and works in Jammu and Kashmir. The views expressed are personal.

India: Kaushik Dasgupta on Communal politics around the biryani

The Indian Express

A Moveable Feast

Communal politics around the biryani has scant respect for its fabled history or diversity. Is it the Persian pilao, improvised and transformed? Is it the result of avant garde experiments in royal kitchens? Or is it a plebeian dish, shaped, like India, by trade and cultural interaction?

Written by Kaushik Dasgupta | Published:September 25, 2016 1:01 am

Food historian Lizie Collingham believes that “biringe” mentioned by Manrique is what is today known as biryani. “This city of tents contained market-places, filled with delicious and appetising eatables… Among these dishes the principal and most substantial were the rich and aromatic Mogol biringes and Persian pilaos of different hues… many tents held different dishes of rice, herbs and vegetables, among which the chief place was taken by the Gujerat or dry biringe,” the Portuguese Catholic priest Sebastian Manrique wrote around 1640. The friar’s memoirs of his travels in India are replete with the usual tribulations of the Europeans in India. But the account, abounding with lament about the difficulty of terrain and the venality of Mughal officials, acquires an ineffable zest whenever there is a reference to food. The Catholic priest was fascinated with the variety of breads and rice dishes eaten by the Mughal royalty. Food historian Lizie Collingham believes that “biringe” mentioned by Manrique is what is today known as biryani.
The Portuguese priest visited India during the reign of the fifth Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan. According to one legend, biryani was first cooked during his reign. It is said that during a surprise visit to the barracks, the emperor’s wife, Mumtaz Mahal, found the troops to be malnourished. She asked the royal cooks to devise a nutrient-rich dish, and, thus, was born the biryani.
This is one of the many theories of biryani’s origins. Another theory has it that the Persian pilao was improvised, and ultimately transformed, into what is today known as biryani in the kitchens of the Mughals. The word biryani, according to this account, derives from the Persian word biryan, or frying.
Around 200 years before Manrique visited India, Shah Jahan’s great grandfather Humayun lost his throne to the Afghan chief Sher Shah. The fugitive prince found refuge in Persia, where the ruler, Shah Tahmasp, was a generous host.
Humayun’s stay in Persia was to inaugurate a history of cultural interaction whose footprints are evident to this day. The Persians loved rice dishes and the cooks in Humayun’s retinue regaled the Shah with a dish of rice and peas. Writes Collingham, “the piece de resistance of Persian cuisine was pilao”. Rice was imported from India, and “the Persians would soak it in salted water to ensure that it was gleaming white, when cooked”. “Their cooks developed numerous variations: Fruit pilaos, turmeric and saffron ones, chicken pilaos for special occasions,” writes Collingham.
What was once a dish that shepherds devised by combining barley or broken wheat with meat cooked on campfire became exotica of sorts when the Persians started importing rice from India. The pilao, then, travelled to different parts of the Islamic world: it Turkey, it became the pilav, in Spain, it became the saffron-flavoured seafood-and-rice dish, paella, and in India, it became the pulao. Here, it acquired another twist.
“The delicately flavoured Persian pilau met the pungent and spicy rice dishes of Hindustan to create the classic Mughlai dish, biryani. One of the most distinctive Persian culinary techniques was to marinate meat in curds (yogurt). For biryani, onions, garlic, almonds, and spices were added to the curds, to make a thick paste that coated the meat. Once it had marinated, the meat was briefly fried, before being transferred to a pot. Then, following the cooking technique for pilau, partially cooked rice was heaped over the meat. Saffron soaked in milk was poured over the rice to give it colour and aroma, and the whole dish was covered tightly and cooked slowly, with hot coals on the lid and around the bottom of the pot, just as with pilau. The resultant biryani was a much spicier Indian version of the Persian pilau,” writes Collingham.
The pulao- biryani difference is one of the hottest debates of Indian culinary history. The food historian K T Achaya wrote that the recipes “in the Ain-i-Akbari show little distinction between pulao and biryani”. But in a few centuries, the difference was much sharper. Food historian Coleen Taylor Sen quotes the 19th century playwright and historian of Lucknow, Abdul Halim Sharar: “To the uninitiated palate, both are the same but because of the amount of spices in biryani, there is always a strong taste of curried rice, whereas pulao can be prepared with such care that this can never happen”.
Sharar believes that during the 18th century, when the Mughal Empire was in its last gasp, the aristocracy in Delhi preferred biryani, while the Lucknow nawabs loved pulao. When the fourth Nawab of Lucknow, Asaf-ud-Daulah, built the city’s famous Bara Imambara as a famine relief measure, he ordered rice and meat to be slow cooked in large cauldrons for the construction workers. Legend has it that during one visit to the construction site, the Nawab was struck by the aroma of the meal and ordered his cooks to bring it to his kitchen. There, it was tweaked to create the Lucknow version, the pakki biryani — meat cooked with spices layered over cooked rice and then slow cooked in a sealed vessel.
A meaty role: The Kolkata biryani substitutes some of the meat with potatoes and eggs. When the British deposed the last Nawab of Lucknow, Wajid Ali Shah, in 1856 and exiled him to Calcutta, the banished ruler’s cooks accompanied their master. The kitchen, though, had none of the past opulence and poverty forced the royal cooks to cut down on the quantities of meat. They innovated with the potato instead and that is said to be the origin of the Calcutta biryani, where the tuber substitutes some of the meat. Another successor state of the Mughal empire, the Hyderabad Nizamat, developed its variant of the biryani. Taylor Sen quotes a French soldier stationed in the princely state as describing a rice dish, “boiled with quantities of butter, fowls and kids with all sorts of spicery”.
In his India Cookbook, food scholar Pushpesh Pant describes the Hyderabadi biryani recipe as raw meat tenderised with unripe papaya cooked in a pan along with the rice, the kachchi biryani. “The art of cooking biryani is in its perfect timing: the marinated meat must cook in the same time as the part-cooked rice when the two are sealed together in a pot. The grains of rice should remain unbroken and separate and should have absorbed the flavourful stock,” writes Pant. Sidiq Jaisi, a poet from Lucknow, who found employment at the Hyderabad Nizam’s court in the 1930s, is quoted by Taylor Sen as describing each strand of rice “in the biryani to be filled with ghee”.

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In culinary history, ascribing origins is a fraught enterprise. That holds true for the biryani as well. Despite biryani’s royal lineage, there is something very basic about the combination of rice and meat. Achaya talks about references to similar dishes in the Tamil literature of the early centuries of the Christian era. Oon soru, a rice dish made with meat, ghee, pepper, bay leaf and turmeric, for example, is said to have been the staple of warriors of the Chola kingdom around the second century AD. In fact, one theory holds that the pilao itself is an ancient dish that derives from the Greek word, pilafi.
The relative ubiquity of its ingredients also makes it plausible that biryani was not solely a royal innovation. One theory has it that while the pulao was a product of courtly culture, the biryani was the plebian fare. It would be safe to say that while the more exquisite varieties of the dish are products of kitchens that had the leisure to experiment with cuisine, biryani, perhaps, owed as much to the activities of merchants, traders and pilgrims.
The spice trade on the Malabar coast is one such example. The availability of rice varieties, the profusion of spices and the cultural spinoffs from trade combined to produce a rice-and-meat dish, somewhat different from the ones devised in the courts of the Mughal emperors and their successors in Awadh and Hyderabad. The Malabar biryani too relies on slow cooking, but it’s this, and not long hours of marinating, that gives the fall-of-the-bone quality to the meat. Compared to the delicately-spiced biryanis of the royal kitchens in the north, and in Hyderabad, the Malabar biryani has a robustness that could possibly owe to its association with a community that made its mark by trading in peppercorns and other spices. The biryani uses the short-grain rice and has varieties in which the meat is substituted by fish or prawns.
The Bohras on India’s west coast use tomatoes and potatoes. The dish, though, is far milder than the Malabar biryani. The Sindhi biryani is another variant of the rice-and-meat dish that uses potatoes.
The dish devised in the kitchens of the royals and the camps and caravans of soldiers, traders and pilgrims has recently become embroiled in India’s recent conflicts over religion, caste and national identity. Perhaps, that has something to do with biryani’s propensity to transcend barriers of class. Street vendors in Delhi sell a version of the dish, the Moradabadi biryani. It uses the kaccha variety of the basmati rice, whole spices and has none of the aroma and resplendence associated with the dish that has claims to royal pedigree. But for anything between Rs 60 and Rs 100 a plate, the Moradabadi biryani is a hearty meal, replete with proteins and carbohydrates.
Biryani’s arrival as a cultural-political trope was, perhaps, announced by the Congress leader, Mani Shankar Aiyar, in the late 1990s. Piqued by his DMK opponent’s constant arraigns about his caste, Aiyar decided to prove his anti-Brahmanical credentials by challenging his rival to a chicken biryani-eating contest. Aiyar won the elections — it’s debatable, though, if his appetite for biryani had any role in his victory.
But it’s only in the last decade or so that politics has threatened to overtake the gastronomical qualities of the dish. Last year, public prosecutor Ujwal Nikam admitted to cooking up a biryani fib to build up a case against the 26/11 accused Ajmal Kasab. The public prosecutor had remarked that Kasab had demanded mutton biryani in jail, but went on to retract his statement.
Tagging Muslims and biryani ignores the fact that non-Muslim communities have their versions of the dish. The biryani of the Syrian Christians in Kerala, for example: unlike the Malabar biryani, this dish uses long-grained rice and is closer to the pulao. The rice-and-meat dish cooked by the Kayastha community in north India too has affinities to the pulao. Food writer Anoothi Vishal notes that Yakhni pulao cooked in Kayastha homes demanded that, “each grain of rice had to be coated with enough flavour from the ghee in which it was roasted and then the stock in which it was boiled”.
Communal politics around the biryani has scant respect for such culinary nuances and diversity. It has become sharper in the last two months with the Haryana government targeting stalls selling the dish in Mewat in the run-up to Eid. Livestock is known to yield more meat compared to goat and is, thus, a comparatively inexpensive source of protein for poorer communities. In its mass avatar, the dish, once the culinary artifact of the royalty and the affluent, uses ingredients that are staples in the kitchens of the poor.
In Hyderabad, for example, the Kalyani buff biryani is far from the dish that originated in aristocratic kitchens. It does not use fine rice and is not suffused with spices. The beef-and-rice dish is said to be the creation of the erstwhile cooks of the Kalyani nawabs of Bidar, the underlings of the Hyderabad Nizams. After independence, when the fortunes of the Nawabs dwindled, some of the cooks moved out and started small food outlets. Gradually, the hole-in-the-wall joints that sold the Kalyani biryani began to be frequented by the city’s strugglers — the unemployed, auto-rickshaw drivers, students, rickshaw-pullers. Today, there are several such joints in the city, where the dish can be had for less than Rs 100. At the Cheemalapadu Dargah in Andhra Pradesh’s Krishna district, biryani is a dish for the indigent. Here, 80-year-old Attaullah Shariff Shataj Khadiri Baba has been feeding biryani to the poor for more than four decades.
Biryani today is as much about nondescript joints, pilgrim fare – even charity – as it is about gourmet cuisine. It’s a hearty meal rich in carbohydrates and protein. The politics over the dish has little appreciation for this aspect of culinary culture.