Veni, vidi, veggie EYE CULTURE

Last month, a public interest litigation (PIL) filed in the Gujarat High Court sought a ban on the augmented reality game, Pokémon GO. The litigant felt that the game hurt religious sentiments by making virtual eggs pop up at players’ current locations, including places of worship such as temples. Virtual or not, this was egg on the face of devout Hindus and Jains, and hence called for strict action against the makers of the offending app.

Just another absurd PIL, did you say? Don’t be so sure. The ire against Pokémon GO’s virtual eggs is really part of a growing cultural trend in India: The tyranny of vegetarianism. It springs from the same mindset that made Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan veto a proposal to include eggs (real, not virtual) in the mid-day meals for children at aanganwadis in 2015. Fish or fowl, eggs or mutton, beef or pork — nothing is kosher in this brave new dietary landscape. Indeed, whether it is cow vigilantism or beef hysteria, they’re all elements of a bigger cultural crusade — the attempt to push vegetarianism at every opportunity and conflate it with notions of purity and “traditional” Indian values.

Remarkably, many are jumping to genuflect before the surge. Domino’s Pizza has announced that during Navratri it will serve only vegetarian food at nearly 500 outlets in north, west and central India. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal too tried to cosy up to the veggie brigade recently when he declared that if voted to power in Punjab, he would ban the consumption and sale of meat in the holy city of Amritsar.

For good measure, he added that he would ban alcohol and tobacco too. It’s almost as if the only way to underscore the sanctity of the Golden Temple — and Mr Kejriwal’s deep devotion to it — is to force the city’s residents to lead monkish lives. Why he did not propose a ban on sex as well remains unclear.

But seriously, the persistent attempt to force plant food down people’s throats is as droll as it is sinister. It strips people of their right to dietary choice. And it is linked to the food fascism that’s playing out in the country today. In the run-up to last month’s Bakri Eid, the Haryana police were conducting “biryani checks” in Muslim-dominated areas like Mewat to make sure chunks of beef weren’t masquerading as mutton in the festive dish. Reportedly, the raids and confiscations of biryani samples have been so frequent that many vendors have stopped selling the item altogether. In Mewat, that’s one meat dish off the menu.

For all the overt and covert measures to make you go off eating animals, India is still a predominantly non-vegetarian country. According to a report by the Registrar General of India, published in June this year, 70 per cent of Indians above the age of 15 are non-vegetarians. However, their numbers are on the decline — down from 75 per cent in 2004. Evidently, flesh-eaters are ceding space to the assertive vegetarians, who are typically from the more affluent upper castes.

Switching to a vegetarian diet may well have manifold health benefits. That claim has been made for centuries. French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau went so far as to say that eating meat was harmful, and produced “cruel and ferocious” people, like the English! Today, one hears that abjuring meat is also more environment-friendly as the livestock industry consumes huge amounts of energy and contributes to global warming.

Perhaps. The point, however, is that one must be free to choose one’s food faves. Whether it is mooli-baingan or mutton rezala, or both, is a matter of personal taste. Slapping a blanket ban on meat in a city or during a religious festival (as Maharashtra did during a Jain festival in September 2015) on the pretext of piety is plain wrong. And it smacks of the same cultural authoritarianism that Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma displayed when he said tourists should not wear skirts in India.

The stridency of India’s veggie lobby is due in part to its high-profile ambassadors. Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself is a shuddh shakahari. When he addresses a massive crowd of adulatory diaspora at New York’s Madison Square Garden and refers to his Navratri fast — as he did in 2014 — the message goes out that self-denial and vegetarianism are intrinsic to the Indian ethos.

That’s as ridiculous as the notion that every Indian knows how to do the rope trick. In truth, nothing about Indian culture is monolithic — not its food, its religions, its cultural mores and so on. We have our ascetics and our bon vivants, our vegetarians and our carnivores. Yet we are increasingly being marched into a sort of communal priggishness — vegetarian, teetotal, abstemious. Last month, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, who imposed prohibition in the state in April 2016 (the Patna High Court struck down the ban on Friday), made the astounding remark that drinking fruit juice in a darkened room would make you feel as though you were having alcohol.

Here’s a message for our politicians and ideologues: Please stop infantilising us and issuing these dietary diktats. It’s an insult to our intelligence and an assault on our freedom of choice.