The Pulse | Society | South Asia

What the West Bengal Egg Row Says About Indian Society

The BJP government, whose support base includes traditionalist Hindus, moved to drop eggs from the midday meal program in Kolkata.

Children at a primary school in Wokha district in Nagaland, India, being served food under the Mid-day Meal Scheme.

A major controversy recently erupted in the Indian state of West Bengal, where a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government recently came to power after state assembly elections. The new government, whose base of support includes traditionalist Hindus, moved to drop eggs from the midday meal program in the state capital of Kolkata.

The midday meal program is a scheme that provides free lunches to children in government schools, a policy that has helped reduce malnutrition in India, a country with a large number of poor and hungry children. Protein is considered vital for growing children and eggs are considered a cheap, affordable, and tasty way of providing protein.

The government instead proposed to award the contract for meal preparation for those schools to the Vaishnavite organization, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), a group that promotes a vegetarian diet. While ISKCON is known for the quality of its products, its catering services still do not provide options for those wishing to eat eggs or meat.

Many traditional schools of Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist thought, including Vaishnavism, advise their followers to eat a sattvic diet, a diet that is said to promote clarity of mind and peace through avoidance of pungent foods, such as onions and garlic, as well as meat and eggs. Many such groups believe that eating eggs is akin to eating embryos or aborted animals. Furthermore, different jatis, or caste groups, have their own dietary traditions. While there are a multiplicity of such traditions — for example, most groups of Brahmins do not eat meat, but some eat goat or fish — more prestigious jatis tend to follow sattvic diets, which do not include eggs. Interestingly, 96 percent of Kolkatans are non-vegetarian.

Schools in other states in India, such as Karnataka or Bihar, provide midday meals with both egg and eggless options. West Bengal itself is looking into an option modeled after neighboring Odisha’s in which schools could procure eggs separately with additional funding.

While politics and religious beliefs are at the root of this controversy, it is not simply about religious beliefs or the desire to use political power to make policies based on those beliefs.

The West Bengal egg controversy sheds some light on the larger structure of Indian society. How can a modern polity be created in a society with thousands of communities with different cultural practices, including dietary expectations? For many families, it is not enough that their children are not being forced to eat eggs, or meat. Choice is not enough because choice is........

© The Diplomat