Veg vs non-veg: The battle within Hinduism

It takes a Hindu to take on other Hindus and a Hindutva party to take on another Hindutva party

Two unrelated incidents last week brought into focus the clout vegetarians enjoy in a country where the majority eat meat. In Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh, Navratri was marked by the forcible closure of shops selling meat, including eggs. And in a distant suburb of Mumbai, a Marathi-speaking businessman was told he would not be sold a flat because only Gujaratis, Marwaris and Jains could buy property in that housing society, specifically not Marathis, Muslims and Christians. In Mumbaispeak, this meant the society was reserved for vegetarians.

The response to the two sets of incidents was equally revealing: while the meat-sellers in the North watched helplessly as Hindutva toughs closed their shops and stalls (even entering a home in one case in Meerut), the Marathi-speaking buyer in Mumbai filed an FIR under IPC Sec 153A - promoting communal enmity - against the flat-owner who refused to sell him his flat.

The two responses brought to light the complex nature of identity and communal politics. The Marathi-speaking buyer who filed the FIR has the silent support not just of his community but of the majority of meat-eaters in Mumbai, who are being increasingly kept out of the housing enclaves built and inhabited by traditionally vegetarian business communities. "For vegetarians only" used to be an excuse to keep Muslims out, but over the past decade, the tag has come to mean what it says.

Ironically, many of these exclusive housing colonies in the distant suburbs are built on farmlands and salt pans once owned by meat-eating communities such as the Agris, who, along with the Koli fishing community, are the original inhabitants of Mumbai. Now, Agris cannot live in buildings that have come up on the land they sold to builders. For the same reason, those who grew up in the historic textile mill area, cannot gain entry into the "towers" that have come up on mill land, even when they can afford to. Marathi-speaking communities, pushed out of their old heartlands in the island city by builders, form a large proportion of those who flock to the distant suburbs for affordable housing.

Besides keeping meat-eaters out of housing colonies, Mumbai's builders have also been able to dictate when Mumbaikars can eat meat. In 2004, the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) government passed a GR (government resolution) banning the slaughter of animals and sale of meat on at least two days during the Jain festival of Paryushan. When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took over in 2014, it increased the ban to four days across the city and all eight days of Paryushan in one suburb, where Jains constitute 25 per cent and meat-eaters 65 per cent of the population.

The loudest opposition came from the BJP's ally, the Shiv Sena, and its offshoot, Raj Thackeray's Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, both of whom protested by selling and even cooking chicken on the roads. The Mutton Dealers' Association challenged the ban; the High Court stayed it as unsuitable for "a modern city like Mumbai", and the Supreme Court refused to interfere.

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Why didn't the North see such resistance to the forcible closure of meat shops this Navratri? That would have required the kind of support for the largely Muslim meat sellers that Marathi-speaking Hindus enjoy in Mumbai. They are, after all, the Shiv Sena's core constituency. That those punishing them for their food habits are Gujaratis only adds to the Sena's anger; the Marathi-Gujarati divide has been one of the party's oldest planks.

There's one more reason this diet imposition hasn't found favour in Mumbai or, indeed, Maharashtra. It's not just that 59.8 per cent of Maharashtra's population eats meat. It's also which of them do so. Maharashtra's Brahmins are vegetarian, and while they dominate the bureaucracy, academia and culture, they stopped wielding political power long back. Neither the Marathas who've ruled Maharashtra since its inception nor Sena chief Bal Thackeray, who ruled Mumbai by remote control since the 1980s, espoused vegetarianism, notwithstanding his loud allegiance to Hindutva.

Significantly, as long as only Muslims were being kept out of housing societies, no political party protested. The community continues to be denied flats, though at least one Muslim succeeded in getting a housing society to change its stand within days of filing an FIR against them. But he had the support of the Hindu who wanted to sell him his flat; when the society said no, the Hindu also went to the cops.

This happened in 2016 under a BJP chief minister. It is difficult to imagine this happening in a BJP-ruled state today. It takes a Hindu to take on other Hindus; and, apparently, a Hindutva party to take on another Hindutva party.

(The writer is a journalist)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.