The rise of vegetarian fundamentalism

Vegetarianism becomes dangerous when a private or religious practice acquires the authority to decide what an entire society should eat, and Bengal’s resistance to this pressure is ultimately a defence of cultural pluralism.

Decades ago, when I was earning my spurs at a newspaper, late journalist Mohan Ram recounted an anecdote of former Prime Minister Narasimha Rao admonishing bureaucrats for writing Nonaligned as Non-aligned. “When a term is prefixed with non-, it acquires a negative connotation,” Rao lectured them.

Ram’s account was my moment of epiphany: I realised vegetarians have been harnessing semantics to display their disdain for food not prepared solely from plants or milk products. Indian society has internalised their sentiments, clubbing mutton, chicken, and fish under the category of non-vegetarian.

West Bengal is among the exceptions. Its people, as do those in some areas in the East, use the term aamish to refer to dishes made of mutton, chicken, and fish. Its opposite is niraamish, or non-meat, non-fish preparations. This is understandable: why would Bengalis look negatively upon the food for which they have an extreme fondness?

Their fondness is confirmed by the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5, conducted between 2019 and 2021, which shows nearly 90 per cent of the population between 15 and 49 years old eat “fish, chicken or meat”. Although egg, too, is aamish, the NFHS puts it in a separate category—85 per cent of the population consume it.

Vegetarian fundamentalists now threaten Bengal’s dietary culture. They have issued a diktat that aamish dishes shouldn’t be served in pandals during the Durga Puja. Outside Bengal, vegetarian fundamentalism has always existed. Even in cosmopolitan cities, vegetarian and nonvegetarian fare in wedding feasts are served on separate tables, with placards distinguishing them clearly.

The vegetarian’s sensitivity is accepted by those who love their meat because they, after all, can and do eat vegetables. This option isn’t available to the vegetarian, whose diet is circumscribed by either personal choice or religious or caste-based rules of purity and pollution. This has led to exclusion, evident from housing societies not allotting or leasing apartments to those whose diet includes meat, fish, and eggs.

The vegetarian fundamentalists’ intolerance has intensified ever since Narendra Modi came to power in 2014. They have taken recourse to state power and the threat of violence to shut down shops selling meat and fish on Hindu festivals, or because they don’t possess requisite licences. Nonvegetarian eateries are hounded on grounds of poor hygiene. Their vegetarian counterparts are rarely subjected to searing administrative scrutiny on the same scale.

One reason for the rise of vegetarian fundamentalism could be that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah belong to Gujarat, where Vaishnavism, with its rigid adherence to vegetarianism, has historically held sway. This is testified to by Mahatma Gandhi in The Story of My Experiments with Truth: “The opposition to and abhorrence of meat eating that existed in Gujarat among the Jains and Vaishnavas were to be seen nowhere else in India or outside it in such strength. These were the traditions in which I was born and bred.”

A century after Gandhi wrote those lines, Gujarat remains overwhelmingly vegetarian—nearly 80 per cent, according to the NFHS-5. It’s the only coastal State in India to have such a high prevalence of vegetarianism, with its people abstaining from fish despite their abundance in the sea lapping its shores.

It’s evident that Modi and Shah, known for their my-way-or-the-highway attitude, don’t find the imposition of vegetarianism offensive. Gandhi was in sharp contrast to them. He deviated from vegetarianism in school, under the influence of a friend, and became a “relisher of meat dishes, if not of meat itself”. Guilt gnawed at him because of his Vaishnavite upbringing. He returned to vegetarianism and continued to abide by it even in England, as he had promised to do so to his mother.

Yet Gandhi wasn’t a vegetarian fundamentalist. He and Lithuanian-born Jewish South African architect Hermann Kallenbach, for instance, toyed with the idea of not cooking meat on Tolstoy Farm in South Africa, but subsequently decided against it. Gandhi wrote, “If I made a rule that meat-eaters should not be helped, I would have to prosecute the Satyagraha struggle through vegetarians only, which was absurd as the movement had been organised on behalf of all classes of Indians.” Perhaps as absurd as the project of turning India into a vegetarian nation, a foretaste of which was the all-veg spread at the recent BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) Summit gala dinner.

In Young India, on May 18, 1921, Gandhi asked Hindus not to compel Muslims to abstain from meat or even beef. He further wrote, “Vegetarian Hindus may not compel other Hindus to abstain from fish, flesh or fowl. I would not make India sober at the point of the sword.” By contrast, violence today defines the vegetarian fundamentalist’s activism. Acutely aware of the limits of vegetarianism and ahimsa, Gandhi, in Young India, wrote on November 1, 1928: “The consumption of vegetables involves himsa [violence], but I find that I cannot give them up.” He had to eat to live, after all.

The implausibility of rooting out violence from life is what the protagonist in Han Kang’s novel, The Vegetarian, doesn’t grasp: a dream of cruel treatment of animals has her forsake meat altogether. Her abstinence is a metaphor for her refusal to conform to South Korea’s predominantly nonvegetarian culture, leading to her being subjected to violence—and ultimately to her breakdown. Although Han’s slim novel transits to other thematic trajectories, the connection between violence and consumption of meat remains haunting.

India shatters the myth of there being a link between violence and diet. Ninety per cent of Haryana’s population is vegetarian, but, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, the rate of violent crimes in 2021 was 43.3, against the average of 30 for all States (Crime rate is calculated as incidence of crime per one lakh population). Lakshadweep is 98 per cent nonvegetarian, but its crime rate is 7.4. West Bengal’s is high: 48.7; Gujarat’s just 11.9.

Yet Gujarat’s pervasive vegetarianism mercilessly torments those who enjoy their meat and eggs. This is tellingly brought out in Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s short story, “They Eat Meat!” A Santhal official is transferred from Bhubaneswar to Vadodara, where he shifts with his Santhal wife and one of their two sons. A Telugu couple rents a portion of their house to the Santhal family, subject to the condition that they won’t cook nonvegetarian dishes, including even eggs.

The Santhal’s wife is a gourmand whose fondness for meat dishes is irrepressible. She eats them on her occasional visits to a cousin living on the campus of a paramilitary unit. At the same time, the city’s tidiness charms her into thinking that perhaps the inaccessibility of meat and fish is a small price to pay to reside there.

The references to Vadodara’s cleanliness allude to regimentation, which has also imposed the vegetarian culture on it. That culture begins to alter her identity, about which the narrator laments, “In Odisha, [she] could be a Santhal, an Odia, a Bengali. In Gujarat, she had to be only Gujarati.”

The story reaches its denouement in February 2002, with the wives of the Santhal tenant and the Telugu landlord, bonded by their love for eggs, initiating resistance against a riotous mob that sets to fire the sole Muslim house in the neighbourhood. Their choice of weapons: kitchen implements and utensils in which mutton or fish had never been cooked. Two years after the riots, the Santhal family returns to Ranchi, where, often while “marinating silver carp”, the wife would say, “No one minds what we eat here. And we don’t mind what others eat.” Shekhar’s story should be a lesson to Bengal that, because of the imposition of vegetarian fundamentalists, its people may find that they are, to twist Thomas Babington Macaulay’s infamous quote, Bengali linguistically but Gujarati in culinary tastes and opinions.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.