At the BRICS summit, India served only vegetarian food to the visiting world leaders and described it as its “rich vegetarian culinary heritage.” That is not what this gesture represented. It represented Hindutva fascism. Acting as a majoritarian state, India ignored its own cultural diversity and used an international forum to promote a particular Hindu nationalist worldview. That is deeply disturbing because this kind of politics is not a threat only to Pakistan or South Asia. It is a threat to the wider world.

India’s claim that vegetarianism represents its culinary heritage does not reflect the country’s actual social and dietary diversity. Vegetarianism is certainly an old religious and cultural tradition in India, but India is not a vegetarian country. According to Pew Research Center, 39 percent of Indian adults identify themselves as vegetarian, while 61 percent do not. Among Indian Muslims, only 8 percent identify as vegetarian, compared with 10 percent of Christians. Among Sikhs, 59 percent identify as vegetarian and 40 percent as non-vegetarian.

The diversity is also regional. India has Bengal’s fish, Kerala’s meat dishes, the food traditions of the Northeast, and the different cuisines of its Muslim, Christian, Dalit, Adivasi and non-vegetarian Hindu communities. All of these are part of Indian culture. To select one particular dietary tradition and present it at an international forum as the face of India is therefore not a reflection of India’s cultural diversity. It is a selective representation of India.

This is where Hindutva enters the picture. Vegetarianism itself is an old Indian tradition; the issue is what happens when one religious and cultural preference is turned into a national norm. In India, food has already become deeply entangled with religious identity and politics, particularly around the cow and beef. Several Indian states have strict laws relating to cattle slaughter, while cow-protection campaigns have also produced serious violence against minorities.

Human Rights Watch documented at least 44 deaths in cow-protection attacks between........

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