A home for vegetarians alone?

The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay campus at Powai

There have been several instances reported over the past few weeks about vegetarians begging non-vegetarians to sit elsewhere, or eat elsewhere, or live elsewhere. There were complaints at IIT Bombay a while ago, for instance, about vegetarian students supposedly feeling nauseous around classmates who ate meat. Naturally, I believe these vegetarian IIT graduates will never move away from vegetarian India to countries like non-vegetarian America. It's amusing how we still bother with these stories though, given how common they have become.

This recent bunch of reports caused a whole lot of predictable outrage online but didn't bother me in the least. When I thought about why that was the case, I arrived at a simple conclusion: it was because I grew up believing that bigotry was somewhat normal. I know this may come as a shock to some people, but we should all have realised by now that everything we were taught in school about all Indians being ‘our brothers and sisters' was a lie. It was just something put into Balbharati textbooks by people who didn't obviously believe it themselves. The truth is, Indians are our brothers and sisters only if they are related to us, follow our religious beliefs, or speak the same language we do. If they don't, they aren't welcome in our homes, buildings, or localities. It's why so many of us say nothing when our ‘brothers and sisters' are lynched in public.

So, no, it didn't surprise me. These stories appear every other month; we just don't notice them as much because prejudice is such an intrinsic part of who we are, and what defines us as Indians. To not accept that fact is ridiculous. It's why we proudly carry these biases with us wherever we go, bringing our own brand of hate and discrimination into foreign cities and countries, confounding foreigners and compelling them to make legal and legislative changes to prevent our behaviour from getting out of hand. As proof, consider the law passed by the Seattle City Council in February this year, amending anti-discrimination protections in employment, public places, housing, and contracting to include caste as a protected class. Would they need to do it if our fellow countrymen hadn't turned up?

It is interesting to consider how that ‘nausea around meat' magically and mysteriously disappears when these hyper-sensitive folk step into a foreign country. Some might even call it hypocrisy, but I wouldn't say that. To be Indian is to be a hypocrite, and it's time we accepted that. It's also why some of us strut around with 56-inch chests at home, then hide behind curtains when foreigners encroach upon what is our own. It may sound like an unrelated analogy, but it's not.

It's strange how we still believe all Indians are treated as equals, as if they exist in a parallel universe radically at odds with the cities we inhabit. It's strange that non-vegetarians complaining about being discriminated against haven't noticed that a few million other Indians are being denied fundamental rights even as they read this, and that this horrific state of affairs hasn't generated as much outrage as it should have. Some of us can't eat chicken; others aren't allowed to live in peace. Choose your battle.

We have long taken bigotry for granted, as a defining principle of what it means to be Indian, and this fact brings me to a proposal: I believe the thing to do is legalise the existence of vegetarian-only enclaves within every part of the country. These ‘No Meat Zones' can then house those who impinge upon everyone else's choices and allow them to wallow in their self-righteousness. What I also suggest is that those advocating for meat-free zones should stick to their principles and die for them. They should insist that their children live within those boundaries too, and dissuade them from studying abroad in lands where meat-eaters thrive. It is only by fighting for their beliefs that the rest of us can respect them.

This whole debate about what is and isn't offensive boils down to our inability to grasp a very simple premise: Our beliefs may be important, but so are someone else's. A world where beliefs co-exist has been possible since the dawn of time. If a meat-eater isn't insisting that you eat meat, you really have no right to insist that they don't. It's their body and their choice. Freedom is about respecting boundaries, because someone has given you a right to boundaries of your own.

When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.