BCCI’s diet advisory on ‘Halal meat’ is a contrived and unnecessary controversy

When I first came to Mumbai, I was foxed by things like Jain bhej and Jain Pau-bhaji on restaurant menus. It didn't quite taste the same thing as street food but at first I thought it was the sheer adrenaline of eating standing up at a roadside stall that made the difference.

I later realised that onions and carrots were missing from the pau bhaji and what at first I couldn't put my finger on about the bhel was the missing finely chopped onion. Street food did not account for Jain taste, I was told, because non-Jain customers gave the vendors better economy of scale but they were the big spenders in the restaurants, so those establishments had to necessarily make provisions for them.

Then a few years later, I found myself on then Congress MP Sunil Dutt's padyatra in Japan from Nagasaki to Hiroshima in the interest of nuclear disarmament. Our food was catered by Japanese Buddhist temples and churches along the way.

Apart from the inevitable sushi, they also served us octopus, at times live (that involved a tricky way of rolling round a stick and swallowing in a particular fashion to avoid it getting stuck in your gullet) – that could kill you if it did not go down in one go, it could thrash about with all eight arms and choke you to death- none of us was brave or adventurous enough to try it.

I did enjoy the rest of their seafood though until one evening a young cameraman on the team, a Jain, seated next to me, whispered in my ear, “Do you quite think you should be eating that?”

He had been chewing on celery sticks and lettuce leaves picked out from the salad throughout and at the time I had no patience with such food conservatism. “You don't eat it if you don't want to," I snapped.

But it has eyes!” he responded in agonised tones. Whereupon I looked more closely at the dish I was about to swallow and discovered - horror of all horrors - it was a bowl of pickled worms!

That was the end of our Japanese food adventure and Dutt got Air India to fly out some masalas to us so that we could cook our own food every day. The Jain boy at least got something substantial to eat after that.

The Japanese meanwhile had removed the pickled worms and all other offending dishes from the table and presumed our objections were on religious grounds- they were largely Buddhist or Shinto but never made fun of our Hindu or Jain sentiments, including the reluctance of even the men in our group to bathe nude in mixed community spas – our religion demanded it, they presumed.

You have to do as your religion says and we must help you to do so, they oft repeated even as the line, ‘My religion does not permit me,” became a joke among us Indians.

The Japanese were not known to be a particularly peaceful, non-violent or tolerant race before World War II as seen from their ritual suicides and their atrocities on the Chinese and others. But I guess the atom bomb changed them quite a bit.

Whatever it may be, their accommodation of our religious sentiments and ready willingness to pull out all the stops to make it possible, in many ways shaped my own attitude to such issues, particularly the food interests of others – you do not force your food preferences on others, you do not eat what you don't want to, even if it is the very healthy cluster beans which I hate - though here I will get booted out of the house if I raise religious grounds for my objections!

Then, again, I recall some years ago, my rather conservative Hindu aunt had a conservative Muslim guest to dinner, among others. “I will come," he said. “But if you are serving non-veg, could the meat please be halal? Otherwise, I could eat vegetarian, that would be no problem.”

My aunt insisted we accompany her cook to the halal shop (so that he didn't cheat) and insisted she must feed her guests what they wanted, not what she thought was desirable. That night she had both kinds of meat on her table and other guests partook of both.

That is why I think the controversy over BCCI ordering only halal meat for all its players is a manufactured one.

Where is the ban on halal meat in the Hindu scriptures? Even when Lord Ram goes hunting for deer in the jungles, at least I did not find any mention anywhere in the Ramayana whether the animal was killed by halal or jhatka I presume it was killed by an arrow, which is neither here nor there; and isn't that the beauty of the practice of the Hindu way of life- no dogmas, no rigid traditions, no hard and fast rules?

Bengali and Konkanastha Brahmins are very fond of their meat and fish, wasn't Mirabai’s main problem with her husband Raja Bhoj that the royal priest served goat meat as mahaprasad in the temple? Do not Kashmiri Pandits celebrate Shiv Ratri with multiple lamb preparations?

With the diversity of food habits even among upper caste Hindus, I think this entire controversy is just another attempt to take the communal divide to another level. We started with India-Pakistan, then Gandhi-Nehru. Then every discourse was about Hindu-Muslim as though nothing else existed in this country- even Covid was given the same twist. Now that people are genuinely tiring of that discourse, they have now started this new halal-jhatka controversy as though Hindus are under threat for sharing the same table as those consuming halal meat.

There was more than one Muslim at my aunt's dinner party but only one of them requested halal. All, including Hindus and Christians, ate it with relish. No one died. They all continue to be hale and hearty. If restaurants could accommodate Jain palates, they might as well do others.

So, I am not going to allow my choices to be dictated by the bigots. It goes against my grain- my religion does not permit it! And that is no longer a joke.

(The writer is Consulting Editor, National Herald, Mumbai. Views are personal)