VEGETARIANISM AND COMMUNALISM

Is there a relation between vegetarianism and communalism? Vegetarianism is supposed to be related to non violence and communalism has often led to violence. So? ! Read on!

Vegetarians and Vegetarianism

Vegetarianism is not same as being a vegetarian. From the beginning of human evolution man depended upon proteins from animals. It has remained an essential part of human diet till today. Vegetarian food can be defined as consisting of animal proteins derived from milk products alone. The logic being that there is no direct killing of animals. Using the same logic some people permit eggs as vegetarian food. There is even a concept of treating infertile eggs as vegetarian eggs!

Throughout history most people had less than 15 % non-vegetarian/animal protein, food in their diet. However it was a very important source of essential protein and was and has always been relished. Most of it was food from water - crabs, prawns and fish. Different ecological zones produced different sources of meat. For American Indians it was bison. Wild boar, rabbits, game birds etc. were and are common in many parts of the world. Regular meat became possible only when domestication of animals and agriculture became more important than hunting and gathering. This happened only about 10,000 years ago.

Domestication of animal made it possible to have milk and milk products as part of diet. And in some areas in India where agriculture was highly productive and domestic animals were more important as draught animals, beef eating was discouraged. That is the origin of taboo on beef in India. Religions like Buddhism and Jainism discouraged beef eating. However, most Buddhists all over the world are not vegetarians. Having animal proteins exclusively from milk products is relatively recent. It began about 2600 ago with Jainism and Jain community. Later some trading communities like the Bania caste (Gandhi was a Bania) and some Brahmin castes in the Western, central and Southern regions also became vegetarians. Historically only in India this concept seems to have taken some root. Even then, today more than 90% of Indians eat non-vegetarian food some time or the other. Vegetarianism, that is propagating and extolling it, was never an important issue.

Today, these vegetarian communities in India, that is the Jains, the trading castes of Banias and Marwaris, and the Brahmins of South India are socially and economically very powerful and therefore vegetarianism in India has become far more powerful than the numbers (5-10%) indicate. Prime situations in the market are taken by these so called ‘pure’ vegetarian eating places in Western and Southern India.

Outside India vegetarian food never took root. Although domestication of animals was widespread, use of milk and milk products was not. Historically, the American and the African continents never used milk. In Asia, the Chinese and the South East Asian countries did not use milk either. Even within India many tribal communities do not use milk. They use itrear cattle mainly for production of bullocks and use the dung for fuel and farming and don’t use the milk at all for themselves. The general logic appears to be that milk is produced by nature only, for offspring and not for other species. Only in the last three hundred years the European culture carried milk all over the world. Today there are probably 1-2 percent vegetarians, that is, people in whose diet the animal protein comes exclusively from milk and its products.

With the advent of Industrial revolution, production of meat, poultry and fish began to get commercialized. By twentieth century the consumption of meat in wealthier families and working class increased enormously. At the same time the scale of production made it highly unhygienic and unsafe. The butcheries were and still are extremely filthy and cruel to the slaughtered animals. Upton Sinclair in his book ‘The Jungle’ (1906) and more recently Robin Cook in his book ‘Toxin’ have documented it forcefully. Reading these books made many give up eating meat and poultry produced by the industry and some people began to propagate the virtues of vegetarian diet. This was the birth of vegetarianism in Europe and the USA. It was and still is a small movement and most people regard them as cranks. There is an even smaller trend called Vegans. These people do not use milk products either. Gandhi tried it once and had to give up. He settled for goat milk.

Vegetarianism in India

In his book ‘The Mahatma and the Ism’ EMS Namboodripad described Gandhi’s first visit to England. While all the progressives were talking about publication of Marx’s Capital, Gandhi, being a Vaishnava Bania, was searching for vegetarian hotels/boarding places in London. In that search he came across vegetarianism. These British people who were considered cranks in England were quite happy to discover a brown person who spoke good English and was actually a vegetarian! In my opinion, it was Gandhi who brought vegetarianism to India. In fact the term, vegetarian and non vegetarian, does not exist in Indian tradition. They have been created for translation purposes only. To repeat, vegetarianism is an ideology as against preference for vegetarian food which is a choice which one may exercise as an individual or group for short or long periods without adding a value judgment to it.

Gandhi made vegetarianism as an important component of his Non-violence movement. It became a must in the ashram life and almost all followers were under pressure to become vegetarians. It also became a part of upward mobility of many lower castes and in at least one case, among tribals (the Tana Bhagat movement among Oraons of Jharkhand). Vegetarianism came to be associated with a moral superiority, requiring moral courage similar to practicing non-violence in the freedom movement. However, the practice of vegetarianism did not become very popular. Lower castes and poor people could not stop eating the little protein that was available from home range poultry or pork. Most tribals could not afford not to eat some wild life food that was easily accessible. But vegetarianism did become associated with higher value system, an ideal, which while one could not achieve in one’s own life nevertheless was respected.

However, this was not so in areas like Bengal, Kerala, Goa and in most of the coastal regions. And it is not accidental that these areas are relatively free from communal violence. Communal violence is by and large a Hindi heartland or as it is called the cow belt phenomenon. The Muslims as a social group never accepted vegetarianism, although several Muslims, like Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan and Maulana Azad were important followers of Gandhi. . This paved the way for vegetarianism to be used as a tool for communalism.

Communalism

Images of Muslim community as the other have been built around some facts that make them different from Hindus in India. Because they are different, poor and have less power therefore they are lower human beings. That has always been the logic of racism and communalism. The specific image here is that they are beef eaters, dirty, highly charged sexually (again associated with eating beef), have four wives, ready to seduce Hindu women, convert them and add to their harem, potential rapists and so on. Other innocent differences are added to make the picture complete. Like they shave their mustache and keep the beard, whereas the Hindus keep the mustache and shave the beard. After the partition of India, another addition is the charge of loyalty to Pakistan and other Islamic countries.

This image has been built over a period of last 150 years or so. The Hindu Muslim divide also has this long history. It has resulted in the partition of the country and a series of communal riots after independence. Riots and killing are possible because the communities on the whole believe in these images and end up endorsing the riots. Deconstructing these images and building saner understanding about these differences is part of the secular agenda. Here, we are dealing only with one part of it, namely vegetarianism.

A Sane Attitude

Vegetarianism, as we noted above, came as a reaction to capitalist production of meat and poultry in the West. It is, on the one hand, an extremely cruel and unhygienic process, it also led to over consumption of red meat.

Why can’t one have a moral attitude towards one’s choice of food? The problem with a moral attitude is that it has a tendency to become righteous and to impose  it upon others. Otherwise every one is free to have his one’s own opinion based on morality or reason or both. In this in instance the vegetarians feel that killing is morally wrong. On the other hand, several communities feel that stealing milk from other species is morally wrong.

Vegans agree with the both the above and reject both forms of animal protein.

There is also an ecological argument against red meat. Meat is produced by animals which eat grass and grain etc. The conversion ratio in terms of energy and nutrition is as high as eight1:8. So, where agriculture production is good it makes sense to avoid eating meat. In grass lands, where rearing domestic animals is the main activity, meat eating becomes natural. In coastal regions and in areas like Bengal fish and other food from water become naturally part of the nutrition.

Capitalist production of agriculture and, hence, vegetarian food is not innocent either. The use of pesticides makes it highly toxic. It is capitalist production of animal food like oil cakes that helps in production of beef and meat. The case of Soyabeen Soyabean production in India is illustrative. It reduced the acreage under Ddal thus increasing the price enormously and reducing the protein intake of vegetarians. The oil cake is exported to Europe where it is fed to cows and pigs. The export is probably handled by the vegetarian ‘oil kings’ of Gujarat. Thus, beef in Europe is supported at the cost of reduced intake of vegetarian protein by vegetarians themselves. Then, production of milk sweets is similar to beef production in terms of load on ecology. It requires a large quantity of milk to produce these ‘mawe ki mithai ‘and ‘chhene ki mithai’. So, as a part of sane policy we should reduce production of SoyabeenSoyabean, restore acreage for Dal dal and reduce production of milk.

As a naturalist or ecologist, one would see a lot of violence being carried out by all (vegetarians and non vegetarians) in the capitalist society. A large number of species are endangered and some have become extinct due to what the naturalists call haibtathabitat loss. Human society is taking over a large amount of space and resources from other living beings resulting in this environmental and ecological disaster. In the final analysis, global warming is essentially a violence done by human being on the planet earthEarth. It is this over exploitation of resources of the earth Earth and depriving other species their habitat - place to live, access to food - that is real violence and not eating so called non-vegetarian food by people.

And so, within the constraints of ecology, one still has choice of what to eat. A variety of balanced diet menus are available for different ecological regions of the world. There is absolutely no need to preach vegetarianism. In fact, one should stop using terms like vegetarian and non vegetarian which divide people unnecessarily. Passages from the Guru Granth Sahib (the holy book of Sikhs) say that only fools argue over this issue. Guru Nanak said that any consumption of food involves a drain on the Earth’s resources and thus on life.

Published in Frontier, August 31-September 6, 2008, Kolkata