Earlier this month, a vegetarian named Chhaya Sharma in Noida chose to order a plain biryani from an eatery called Lucknowi Kebab Parantha through the Swiggy food delivery app. She received a parcel, opened it, ate a bit and then realised that it was a chicken biryani.
In a tearful video shared on social media, she alleged that the wrong delivery was intentional and hurt her sentiments, that too during Chaitra Navaratri. Her meltdown should have become a meme that the less entitled among us, no matter our dietary preferences or obligations, laughed at. Instead, Sharma’s theatrics turned a harmless mix-up into a farcical misuse of power. The owner, Rahul Rajvanshi, was arrested.
The term non-vegetarian is a misnomer that comes out of Indian caste purity concepts, and I don’t like to use it. I have occasionally been quite disappointed when a restaurant mixes up my order and the meat in a dish I was craving turns out to be capsicum or paneer — both tasty ingredients, just not what I ordered. All I do is snap a photo, upload it to the app, get a refund and move on with my life. It happens to lots of people, all the time.
It certainly also happens to many vegetarians, who unlike me may not eat the delivered dish (albeit a bit sulkily), and who then have to find an alternative, no matter how hungry they are. They may seethe, and perhaps make a decision to toggle to vegetarian-only restaurants in future — a feature that is provided to suit the preferences of customers who are lower in numbers but higher in socio-political capital — but they don’t usually try to turn a minor human error a human rights issue.
That’s right: not animal rights. Vegetarianism in India has nothing whatsoever to do with animal rights, and even those who are sincerely inclined in that direction would do well to equally sincerely educate themselves on the work of anti-caste thinkers and activists who have worked extensively on this subject.
Rajvanshi would never have been arrested had a customer gone online to cry about receiving a meatless dish. This overreach by the authorities occurred somewhere on the spectrum between practising crockery separation in one’s own home and mob lynchings of ordinary citizens because they eat meat (especially if that meat happens to be beef). It is a casteist, communalist over-reach, enabled by the prejudices of many Indians — but certainly not most, because India lands at just somewhere between 20% and 39% vegetarian according to large-scale surveys, and we can still dare hope that only a smaller percentage of this number wishes to restrict other people from consuming what they prefer to. Rajvanshi should never have been arrested in the first place. That this happened should upset us all, regardless of our dietary inclinations or obligations.
Vegetarian privilege is a topic that has to be more broadly examined. Vegetarian paranoia about meat-eaters — and to be more specific, non-Hindu meat-eaters — forcing or tricking them into consuming meat is something that sensible vegetarians need to reflect on, as well as initiate discussions amongst others who make similar choices. The point is choice, always.