Make No Mistake, the Meat Ban Is Minority Appeasement

The Bombay High Court’s meat ban order pulls no punches, and that’s essential.

• A minority community can indulge in majoritarianism against other minorities.
• “Minority appeasement” fails constitutional scrutiny.
• Ideologies and politics of food choices requires judicial discourse.
• Supreme Court endorses the Bombay High Court’s stance.

“Minority appeasement”, hitherto the bogey used as a rallying cry by Hindutva parties and their acolytes, has entered the judicial lexicon. And interestingly, a court has used this term to slam a majoritarian government for pandering to the demands of a minority community whose financial clout and political prowess vastly exceed its numerical strength.

The Bombay High Court in its September 14 Order in the meat ban case has emphatically spoken what till now was verboten—can a minority community hold others to ransom, imperil the rights and livelihood of both another minority community as well as those of many from the majority? And, can the government support, or allow itself to succumb to, such demands?

The court was ruling on the writ petition filed by the Bombay Mutton Dealers Association against the Maharashtra government’s circular directing the closure of the Deonar Abbattoir on 17 September and prohibition on the sale of meat. The petitioners had challenged the circular as not only violative of their fundamental right to freedom of trade and profession, but also vague and arbitrary because it did not include cold storages and other shops selling packaged food, and had left out pork and seafood.

Facts and Numbers Matter

It was widely believed that the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in the Hinsa Virodhak Sangh case was the last word on meat bans imposed out of respect for the Jain community’s religious sentiments.

In that case, Justice Markandey Katju had ruled in favour of the Ahmedabad municipal authorities which prohibited animal slaughter for the nine days of Paryushan. Katju had reasoned that since Jains formed a significant, almost overwhelming part of the city’s population, the Muslim butchers and meat eaters, a minority, ought to defer to dominant beliefs and sentiments out of a commitment to communal harmony.

As explained before, this judgement suffered from several flaws, the most glaring of them being a misconceived belief and understanding of religious majoritarianism and its various manifestations.

It is here that the Bombay High Court makes a welcome and much-required departure. First, it ruled that in Mumbai, 8.2 lakh Jains in a total population of 22 million comprising people from multiple faiths had no constitutional right to demand the sort of deference which was the bone of both political and judicial contention here. Furthermore, the government’s entertaining such a demand and granting it legal sanction smacked of “minority appeasement”. This, the judges unequivocally stated, was in contravention of constitutional provisions and non-derogable principles.

The Politics of Dietary Choices

A common refrain in the public outcry and Internet outrage against the meat ban is that the government has no business to dictate what an individual eats.

While privacy is an important concern, viewing the issue only from this angle is facile. Because, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued, tastes and food preferences are not the result of innate, individualistic choices of the human intellect. Rather, they are socially conditioned to reflect a symbolic hierarchy that is determined and maintained by the socially dominant in order to enforce their distance or distinction from other classes of society.

Kanchah Ilaiah, Dalit scholar and sociologist, explains how demands for vegetarianism are a tool of oppression against Dalits, other depressed classes, and non-Hindus. The high court slips on this, stressing upon individual choice, though it makes a passing reference to “idealism” determining what one eats. One hopes that when the hearing for final disposal resumes, the court would delve more into this crucial aspect.

The court has listed nine questions for further adjudication. These are indeed comprehensive in their ambit, and take into account every conceivable aspect, even political expediency. How the court deals with them remains to be seen, but the rebuke of the government and proponents of the ban didn’t come a moment too soon.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court, while refusing to entertain a plea to stay the high court Order, observed that prohibitions on meat cannot be forced down anyone’s gullet. This provides reason for optimism- that there could be a judicial course-correction.