The Meat Is Not On

Money can buy a lot of things, including a meat ban. This is the simple explanation for the prohibition on the slaughter of animals and sale of meat at civic markets for four days in Mumbai during the Jain festival of Paryushan Parva.

Jains are just 0.4 per cent of India’s population. There are only 4.2 million of them and that doesn’t count for much of a vote bank. There is no reason for any political party to humour them if not for their being one of India’s wealthiest communities. Their voices are louder and their coercions more subtle and legal. The present issue shows that rich and educated people (over 90 per cent of Jains are literate) are not necessarily the most tolerant, and it could in fact quite possibly be the opposite.

They do understand what it is to be on the other side of a ban. Just a few weeks ago, the community had come onto the streets asking for the right to commit suicide because they didn’t agree with a Rajasthan High Court ruling banning the practice of santhara, the wilful giving up of life through starvation. The right to kill oneself is actually a legitimate demand when put across as the fundamental freedom of a human being over his life.

But their agitation was not for such a universal moral principle. Instead, it was for their right to a religious practice, and there it gets complicated because by that logic India should be allowing Sati, the self-immolation of widows because in theory Sati too is voluntary. Even the four-day stoppage of slaughter of animals might have been a virtuous deed if not for the manner of its enforcement—by diktat as a state regulation.

It is perfectly understandable that a community can be against a ban one month and the very next month be in favour of another, since it is purely a matter of self-interest. There is, however, no justification for the state to be a party to it.

Or if it has to be, then the same consideration must be granted to every religious group in the country. That is why the All India Majlis-e- Ittehadul Muslimeen has petitioned the Indian President asking for the state’s beef ban to be relaxed during Bakri Eid. There is no rational counter-argument that can be made now. The only answer will be silence.

Money, however, also decides the resistance to such absurd meat bans. The outrage that you see on social networking sites and the media comes after the order implementing the ban in Mumbai. Just a few days before that, in the outlying suburbs that come under the Mira-Bhayandar municipality, such a ban was announced for an entire week. No one really cared because that part of town is not seen as Mumbai proper and assaults on freedom are only worth getting angry over if it happens in metropolises and affects upper-class non-vegetarians.

It is a vacuous virtue that seeks to gain religious merit by making others behave according to your god. And it’s not really very convincing if it comes with riders and exemptions. How else does one explain the exemption of fish from this ban?

MaharashtraMeat banMumbainon-vegetariansSantharaUpper caste