Meat goes off the menu at village restaurants
FEAR Owners say they are not taking any chances as they are afraid of being persecuted for serving any kind of meat, including chicken
Meat is off the menu in restaurants around Uttar Pradesh’s Bisada village following the lynching of Mohammad Ikhlaq over rumours of butchering a cow and eating beef, indicating a climate of fear amid growing communal polarisation in the area.
Restaurant owners said they were taking no chances as they were afraid of being persecuted for serving any kind of meat, including chicken and fish, as sectarian tensions simmered in Bisada where local BJP leaders have been stirring up passions with incendiary speeches.
“We can’t take a risk for some money. We have stopped serving any meat. The atmosphere is tense and we can’t talk about it much,” said Sunil Sisodia, owner of Maharana hotel outside Bisada village. He added that the only non-vegetarian item on his menu was eggs.
Bisada has been on edge since a mob lynched 55-year-old Ikhlaq a week ago and left his younger son, Danish, critically injured.
Rattled by the atmosphere of fear, many roadside shops that used to sell chicken and fish have also closed down for fear of sparking any violence. “It’s hard to find meat in this area. Also, this is not the right time to eat non-veg food,” said Sunil Sisodia.
Small hotels in the nearby village of Piyali, a Jatav-dominated area, have also turned vegetarian to avoid any problems in a communally-charged environment with political leaders seeking to polarise the electorate ahead of this month’s panchayat polls in the state.
“It’s better to avoid non-veg for a while. We have not stopped it forever. We will serve meat when the time is right. Though the changed menu is inviting less customers, that’s a very small amount for our security,” said a restaurant owner, Mahesh Kumar. “We did it voluntarily.”
One restaurant owner, Iftikhar Ahmad, said he sold all the meat he had to a relative’s restaurant in Dadri.
“After the incident in Bisada, we hid all the raw and cooked meat. The next night I stashed all the meat and sold it to one of my relatives who runs a restaurant in Dadri area,” said Iftikhar. “Some big pieces of meat were rotten but we could not dump them anywhere. I had to carry them to an isolated place to bury them.”