Asif Mahmood

At the BRICS summit, India served only vegetarian food to the visiting world leaders and described it as its “rich vegetarian culinary heritage.” That is not what this gesture represented. It represented Hindutva fascism. Acting as a majoritarian state, India ignored its own cultural diversity and used an international forum to promote a particular Hindu nationalist worldview. That is deeply disturbing because this kind of politics is not a threat only to Pakistan or South Asia. It is a threat to the wider world.

India’s claim that vegetarianism represents its culinary heritage does not reflect the country’s actual social and dietary diversity. Vegetarianism is certainly an old religious and cultural tradition in India, but India is not a vegetarian country. According to Pew Research Center, 39 percent of Indian adults identify themselves as vegetarian, while 61 percent do not. Among Indian Muslims, only 8 percent identify as vegetarian, compared with 10 percent of Christians. Among Sikhs, 59 percent identify as vegetarian and 40 percent as non-vegetarian.

The diversity is also regional. India has Bengal’s fish, Kerala’s meat dishes, the food traditions of the Northeast, and the different cuisines of its Muslim, Christian, Dalit, Adivasi and non-vegetarian Hindu communities. All of these are part of Indian culture. To select one particular dietary tradition and present it at an international forum as the face of India is therefore not a reflection of India’s cultural diversity. It is a selective representation of India.

This is where Hindutva enters the picture. Vegetarianism itself is an old Indian tradition; the issue is what happens when one religious and cultural preference is turned into a national norm. In India, food has already become deeply entangled with religious identity and politics, particularly around the cow and beef. Several Indian states have strict laws relating to cattle slaughter, while cow-protection campaigns have also produced serious violence against minorities.

Human Rights Watch documented at least 44 deaths in cow-protection attacks between May 2015 and December 2018, including 36 Muslims, with around 280 people injured.

That background matters. In India, food is no longer simply about food. Questions of meat, beef and cattle have become linked with religious identity, minority rights and majoritarian politics.

Seen in that context, serving only vegetarian food at a BRICS event cannot simply be dismissed as a harmless culinary choice. It was an international event attended by leaders from different countries and different cultural backgrounds. India could have presented its vegetarian cuisine without excluding other food traditions. Instead, it presented one particular cultural preference as the representative face of India.

India did not showcase the full diversity of its own civilisation. It selected one aspect of that civilisation and placed it above the others. In doing so, it also diminished the very diversity that India claims as part of its cultural identity.

This is why the incident deserves attention beyond the menu itself. The BRICS summit was not a Hindu religious gathering. It was an international forum. When a state carries its majoritarian cultural politics into such a forum and presents it as national culture, the issue goes beyond food.

The concern is not whether the BRICS leaders came to India to eat meat. The concern is what India chose to represent  Hindutva at an international forum.

It chose to represent a particular Hindutva conception of India rather than the India that actually exists: diverse in religion, culture, region and food.

That should concern the world. A political ideology that seeks to turn the culture of a religious majority into the defining identity of an entire country does not remain confined to a plate or a kitchen. When such thinking is projected through an international forum, it becomes a wider warning about the direction in which majoritarian politics can move.

The BRICS table, therefore, was not simply about vegetarian food. It was a small but revealing expression of a much larger political project: the projection of Hindutva as the identity of India.