In India, what you eat says a lot about who you are, apparently – your “purity” and your social standing. From a specially curated list of popular food items of Uttar Pradesh to the meat ban in the narrow streets of Varanasi, what food you consume has come under the scrutiny of our state.
In November 2025, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s government unveiled the “One District, One Cuisine” (ODOC) scheme, dedicating a whopping ₹150 crore to identify signature dishes from each of the state’s 75 districts and promote them as economic and tourism boosters. What seemed like a harmless and rather exciting celebration of food cultures is massively exclusionary and political in its very essence.
The list of all 208 dishes is entirely vegetarian!
Tunday Kababi’s legendary galouti kebabs of Lucknow are missing from the list. So are mutton korma, nihari kulcha, Rampur’s seekh kebabs, Moradabadi biryani, and Awadhi biryani, perhaps the most globally recognised dish ever to emerge from the state. On the other hand, some items making it to the list seem absurdly inserted – “Spices” from Raebareli, “Edible Oil” from Kanpur, and “Honey” from Saharanpur.
The exclusion is not accidental. Uttar Pradesh, home to over 24 crore people, has a Muslim population of roughly 21.46 per cent, concentrated in cities like Lucknow, Moradabad, and Rampur, places which are also the historic heartlands of kebab and biryani culture. This is both a culinary and a communal erasure, directly reflected on the food map of the state.
By scrapping non-vegetarian dishes from the state’s official food identity, the government is denying them the subsidy, the recognition, and the export infrastructure required to promote the food item worldwide. It is the government deciding whose food counts as heritage and whose counts as contamination.
Food politics has recently come to the limelight in several more BJP-led governments. The BJP has long treated Varanasi as their favourite city, a template of the ideal Hindu city, which in practice means the systematic removal of anything that doesn’t fit that image, starting with meat.
The Varanasi Municipal Corporation recently planned to relocate all meat, fish, and poultry stores within the city limits to designated sites on its outskirts before the advent of the holy month of Sawan. The supposedly spiritual move functions as a general hostile signal to Muslim traders and Dalit workers who dominate the meat trade.
The beneficiaries of “spiritual tourism” are upper-caste Hindus and the tourism economy built around them. The losers are Muslim butchers and their families; Dalit workers in the slaughterhouse, and the thousands of residents, including, as one Bengali Tola resident pointed out, Bengali Hindu families for whom fish is both food and a religious tradition, who simply want to buy dinner.
“Such a decision goes against the right to livelihood, which is the fundamental right to earn a living with dignity, and it amounts to depriving a large population of their means of survival,” Congress National Secretary, Shahnawaz Alam told The Hindu.
Alam added that this move by the government “imposes uniformity on the Hindu society”. India is hailed as a nation with a huge Hindu population (true) wherein most people practise vegetarianism by default (false). The BJP government wants to float the idea of Hinduism being a spiritual and non-violent form of lifestyle, but the claim badly needs a historical factcheck.
Vegetarianism as Brahminical Politics: A Historical Fact Check
The idea that vegetarianism is India’s civilisational default and that meat-eating is a form of impurity is not an ancient belief. It is a political project with a traceable history, one that our constitution’s founding father, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, spent years studying and dissecting.
In his landmark 1948 work, The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables?, Ambedkar argued that Brahminical abstention from beef was not a timeless spiritual conviction but a competitive ploy against the rising popularity of Buddhism. Buddhism’s central ethic of non-violence (ahimsa) was drawing mass followings away from Brahminical Hinduism. The Brahmin response, Ambedkar contended, was to appropriate and surpass Buddhist compassion – not by giving up animal sacrifice (which they still continued) but by adopting vegetarianism as a marker of superior Hindu purity.
The cow itself became the instrument of this transformation. By sacralising the cow and making beef taboo, the Brahminical order created a powerful social sorting mechanism. Those at the top of the caste hierarchy, who do not eat meat, were rendered “pure”. Those who ate meat but not beef occupied a middle ground. Those who ate beef, primarily Dalits, who survived on dead cattle that upper castes would not touch, were permanently marked as “untouchable”.
The Brahminical association of vegetarianism with “sattvic” purity and meat-eating with “tamasic” degradation has ancient textual roots. The very category of “Brahmin” contains contradictions when it comes to food: an Iyengar Brahmin from Tamil Nadu follows a strictly vegetarian diet, while a Bengali Brahmin is, and has historically been, an enthusiastic fish and meat eater. The idea of a monolithic vegetarian Hindu identity is a North Indian, upper-caste projection, not a sociological reality.
India Is Not a Vegetarian Country
Running beneath all of these communal culinary interventions is a foundational fault – the firm belief that India is, and has historically been, a vegetarian nation and that non-vegetarians (particularly beef-eaters) are a deviant minority imposing their habits on a vegetarian Hindu majority.
According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), conducted across India in 2019–21, only 16.6 per cent of men in the 15-49 age group have never eaten non-vegetarian food. For women, the figure is 29.4 per cent. Put plainly, 83.4 per cent of Indian men and 70.6 per cent of Indian women eat meat, fish, or poultry daily, weekly, or occasionally. And the numbers are only trending upward.
Telangana, meanwhile, has a meat-eating population of 98.8 per cent among survey respondents, which makes for a higher proportion than the United States or Australia. Kerala is at over 90 per cent for both men and women. Maharashtra hovers around 71 to 83 per cent. Even in BJP-governed Gujarat, widely mythologised as a vegetarian heartland, 39 per cent of women and 51 per cent of men reported eating meat.
India remains one of the world’s largest exporters of bovine meat, almost all of it buffalo meat (‘carabeef’). USDA forecasts projected exports of roughly 1.64 – 1.65 million metric tonnes in 2025. Major export-oriented buffalo-meat industries operate in states such as Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh. This has often been cited as a contradiction in Indian politics: while beef consumption and cattle slaughter are heavily regulated in many states, India continues to maintain a large buffalo-meat export sector.”
The apparent paradox dissolves once you understand who is doing the exporting. The major beef export companies are Allanasons, Al-Hamd Food Products, Mirha Exports, HMA Agro, which are largely Muslim-owned enterprises. The state benefits from their foreign exchange earnings while simultaneously criminalising the ability of certain communities to consume the same product within the country.
India’s food map is vast, plural, and deeply tied to its religious, caste, and regional diversities. It contains the fish curries of Bengal, the pork dishes of Nagaland, the beef stews of Kerala’s Syrian Christians, the mutton rogan josh of Kashmir, and yes, the galouti kebabs of Lucknow. To govern food is to govern identity. And to govern identity through exclusion – to decide whose plate is pure and whose is polluted – is not cultural policy. It is the continuation of the caste and religious hierarchy by those in power.
Note from the Editor
This article discusses non-vegetarian food because the issue at hand is not food itself, but the politics surrounding it. The inclusion of meat dishes should not be interpreted as an endorsement or promotion of meat consumption.
The Founding Editor of The Secularist is vegetarian and respects the ethical and environmental reasons many people choose not to eat meat. Dietary choices are deeply personal and should remain a matter of individual conscience.
The central argument of this article is that, in parts of India, food has become a tool of exclusion, discrimination and, at times, deadly violence. Accusations or suspicions surrounding what people eat, particularly allegations of beef consumption or involvement in the cattle trade, have been linked to mob attacks and killings, disproportionately affecting Muslims and Dalits. The issue, therefore, is not whether people should eat meat, but how food is being weaponised to marginalise, persecute and, in some cases, kill people because of their identity. This article examines that political reality. It does not seek to persuade readers to adopt any particular diet but to consider the consequences of using food as a marker of citizenship, belonging and human worth.
This article is republished from The Secularist under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Sucheta Chaurasia
Sucheta Chaurasia is a researcher and journalist with The Secularist. Previously, she has worked with print and digital news platforms in India and the UK, telling multimedia stories of human interests, community journalism, climate change, and socio-cultural politics.
