New Delhi meat shops stay shut for nine-day Hindu festival

Meat shops across India’s capital New Delhi remained shut yesterday after officials from the prime minister Narendra Modi’s party demanded their closure during the nine-day long Hindu festival that began on April 2nd.

Two mayors from Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) said Hindus did not eat meat during the Navaratra festival that celebrates the victory of good over evil. They claimed that their community’s “beliefs and sentiments” were “unpleasantly affected” when they encountered meat shops on their way to offer prayers at neighbourhood temples.

In his fiat issued earlier this week, the East Delhi mayor Shyam Sunder Agarwal said that he had instituted 16 teams of officials to enforce the meat sale ban until April 11th; anyone violating it faced either a fine, a revocation of their licence or a sealing of their shops – or possibly even all three.

The ban, which has adversely impacted more than 20,000 city meat traders, the majority of them Muslim, has also triggered widespread outrage on social media, with many people saying that the embargo violated India’s pluralism and cultural diversity.

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Some accused the BJP of “selectively targeting” Muslims to “harass” and “oppress”. Muslims constitute 14 per cent of the country’s population of more than 1.3 billion.

Others tweeted that any individual’s choice to abstain from eating meat should not infringe on others to either consume or sell it. “Those fasting or those who are vegetarian are free to do their own thing, but why are their food habits being foisted on all Indians and hurting the business of meat vendors?” one person tweeted.

Constitution

Opposition MP Mahua Moitra stated that India’s constitution allowed her to eat meat whenever she liked, and shopkeepers the freedom to sell it.

Ever since the BJP assumed federal power in 2014, it has made India’s food habits an integral part of its politics by banning individual beef consumption and outlawing cow slaughter as the animals are considered holy by the country’s majority Hindu community. The party gradually extended this beef ban to include all other non-vegetarian fare.

Last August, the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh state, north of Delhi, permanently banned the sale of meat in the Hindu temple town of Mathura, with a population of more than 2.6 million.

In November 2021, the BJP administration banned the street sale of all non-vegetarian fare, including eggs and fish, in four major cities in Modi’s western home state of Gujarat on the grounds that it “offended” Hindu religious sentiments. India’s majority Hindu community is typecast as vegetarian, but many Hindus remain diehard meat eaters, though do not admit to it publicly for fear of community censure.