A Beef-Eater Locks Horns with the Bans
“The cow is of the bovine ilk,” the American poet Ogden Nash once wrote. “One end is moo, the other milk.”
These two ends locked horns on 2 March 2015 when Maharashtra’s Bharatiya Janata Party-led government wrote into law a poll promise to protect its avowed matriarch from those who utilised her in more ways than one.
Maharashtra is the sixteenth state to ban cattle slaughter in toto, and has augmented an existing law to encompass bulls and bullocks. But it is the move to criminalise possession and sale of beef with fine and imprisonment (or to make it a crime equivalent to murder, as the Haryana state government has decreed) that set off a massive outcry among those who feared that the legislation would also be imposed nationwide given that the the BJP is also the government at the centre.
Reducing an affordable source of nutrition for many Indians to vulgar contraband raises questions of trammelling fundamental rights, freedom of choice and religious liberty. As a Malayalee and a Hindu, I eat not only beef, but fish, seafood, pork, chicken and mutton. I also consume, without guilt, quail, duck, turkey, goose and rabbit—as long as they are farm-bred and not endangered species. I will admit that I did steer off this principle as an exception, when I ate a fruit bat in the Seychelles, but that is a story for another time.
My outlook towards what may appear to be my controversial eating habits has always been simple. I am not god-fearing but god-tolerating, in that I recognise and respect every person’s right to acknowledge his or her god and religion. Is it so unnatural to expect, then, that the same respect is accorded to my choice of food?
I was raised in Bangalore in a family that made frequent temple visits, observed festivals and decreed days on which the consumption of meat was not permitted. We participated in these with as much enthusiasm as we did on other days when we cooked our meat and consumed it with delight. My religious parents and I shared amicable meals, more often than not, with beef on the table. No one advised us on what we should eat unless it was a recommendation to try foods that were new, healthy or interesting. Against the backdrop of that upbringing, devoid of any taboos, I began to regard food choices with gastronomic and anthropological curiosity: to me they represented cultural richness and diversity.
I lived and worked in Mumbai from 2001 to 2004 when many old-timers still called it Bombay, and each was entitled to his or her share of beef. Today, it both angers and saddens me that getting hold of a plate of beef fry at Colaba’s Bagdadi, once a Sunday-afternoon ritual for me, has become a thing of the past. The only person who would rejoice at this unfortunate turn of events is my cardiologist.
But for random rants—and some Rishi Kapoor back-slapping after the actor tweeted in defence of beef-eating—Mumbai’s beef- (and buffalo-) eaters stomached the new law with disappointing timidity. In a stronger protest, butchers at the city’s Deonar abattoir, the largest in Asia, stopped slaughtering buffaloes, threatening to dent India’s enviable reputation as the world’s largest beef exporter after Brazil. Supply was halted after the ban came into effect, resulting in an increase in the prices ofprices of mutton and chicken . Beef-eaters of all stripes,including captive tigers and lions at the zoo in Sanjay Gandhi National Park, have now been forced to survive on chicken and mutton at taxpayers’ expense while humans at the bottom of the pyramid struggle to pick a bone.
In Kerala, unsurprisngly, the resistance was strident. That the Malayalee needs his beef as much as the Goan craves her pork was evident in the beef-eating protest that took place on 10 March in Thiruvananthapuram, a week after the Maharashtra ban was announced. Hindus and Muslims alike, not to mention more than a few Christians, sat at the same table and ate their beef to emphasise the point that the state should back off from dictating what its people should eat. Although the BJP has not opened its account in Kerala, its vote-share has increased with every election. And that is reason enough for the self-respecting Malayalee to ensure that beef fry does not disappear from our plates.
Interestingly, on 20 March, Goa chief minister Laxmikant Parsekar reportedly said that there would be no ban on beef in the state as it did not believe in interfering with people’s food habits. In Karnataka, which has native Muslim and Dalit beef-eaters in addition to a large population of immigrants from Kerala, the issue of beef consumption has been a contentious one. For the Bangalorean Malayalee, buying beef had never been a problem—all you had to do was walk into your friendly neighbourhood Malayalee meat shop and nod at the only item listed on the chart in Malayalam. Things started getting thorny when the BJP government under BS Yeddyurappa, in 2010, amended a 1964 bill against cow slaughter and attempted to enact it as the law, which would have carried similar penalties that have now been imposed in Maharashtra. Students of Bangalore University responded by cooking and eating beef on campus. In December 2014, the Congress government, which came to power in the state in 2013, withdrew the bills.
Despite that development, beef merchants in Bangalore are worried about their future. Shivajinagar’s famed Beef Market, a cavernous edifice that was once host to nearly a hundred stalls built during the British era when it supplied the Cantonment, wears a deserted look on Sundays. Thick cobwebs coat the meat hooks outside empty shops.
“Only about half of us do regular business,” said Dastagir, whose family has sold beef for five generations. In my childhood years, before Malayalee beef stores appeared in the city’s suburbs, I used to accompany my father to this market to buy beef. I remember it as a bustling, thriving place, though not for the faint of heart.
Dastagir alleged that the BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) activists were disrupting the livelihood of several others like him. “They stop our trucks, confiscate our animals, and take them to ashrams where they are malnourished and lose weight. They beat up our drivers and threaten government veterinarians who are now scared to certify the animals.”
In Karnataka, the law holds that no cows may be slaughtered, but bullocks, bulls and buffalos that are certified by a government veterinarian as old or unfit for labour may be slaughtered for meat.
As Dastagir was explaining his predicament to me, a customer walked in and purchased two and a half kilograms of beef for Rs 500. “At this price, I might as well buy mutton,” she murmured when the shopkeeper apologised to her.
“It’s an everyday battle,” he said, hinting that he believed this was also a result of some meddling by poultry and mutton traders who were intent on edging out the beef traders’ profits. He was hopeful that as long as the Congress government remained in power, the ban would not take effect. That has proven to be hardly any comfort, though. Last May, Karnataka elected thirteen BJP Members of parliament to the Lok Sabha. “Eventually you must do what your daddy says,” Dastagir mused, articulating fears that a cornered state government would cave to the centre’s diktat.
Chewing on Dastagir’s words, I drove a few kilometres to Richmond Town, where I had spent many memorable after-school hours snacking at the cheap eateries in Johnson Market—a meat, vegetable and fruit market set up in the 1920s. The irresistible aroma of char-grilled meat wafted towards my nose from Hotel Fanoos near Masjid-e-Askari, the city’s oldest Shia mosque. Shakir, the twenty-five-year old proprietor, manages the modest restaurant that his late father ran for four decades. The very affordable Jumbo Kebab Rolls—two succulent, lightly spiced beef seekh kebabs wrapped in naan with sliced onion and a sprinkle of lemon juice—are still the quickest-moving items on the menu. They have barely changed in price or quality in the two-and-a-half decades that I have frequented the eatery, although its crumbling façade recently got a facelift. Regular supply from Johnson Market has allowed Fanoos to keep its fare affordable.
“A meal for Rs 30, a feast for Rs 150,” Shakir smiled, as he excused himself to attend to the variegated clientele milling at the counter—women in summer dresses and young men in shorts, ladies in burqas and bearded men in prayer caps.
Taking in the sight, I could not help but recall Dastagir’s words: “Sab khaate hai, dost (Everyone eats it, friend). But those who eat it should also join cause with us. Else, there’s no justice.”