An Argument Against The Ban On Sale Of Meat And Fish In Bihar

In his seminal work on politics and social change in India in the late 1950s, social anthropologist Fred G. Bailey categorised political parties to be of mainly two types: ‘parties of integration’ and ‘parties of representation’. Parties of representation would be concerned mostly with elections and otherwise lie dormant in the period between elections. Parties of integration on the other hand are much more constricting, Bailey said, “working like a python, swallowing the entire lives of its members.”

Parties of integration were not merely concerned with electoral victory and political power, but were keen to use these to control all aspects of the lives of their members and supporters, eventually forming a one-party government. Such parties usually achieve total control over the governed by regulating what citizens see, hear, read (via propaganda and a compliant media) and even eat. The recent ban on the sale of meat and fish in open/public spaces in the urban areas, enforced by the NDA government led by BJP in Bihar is a reminder of what this ‘total control’ looks like. Initially cloaked as a step towards making cities of Bihar cleaner, the controlling aspects of this recent legislation became more open from the public statements of a deputy chief minister, who claimed that the sale of meat and fish near educational institutions gives rise to “violent tendencies” among kids.

Following the pattern of meat bans of various natures, from partial or localised enforcements restricted to religious places or timed around festivals in different states like Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Assam, Odisha and Jharkhand, the ban in Bihar is also seeking to minimise the visibility of meat and fish shops in public spaces - with a complete removal of open shops and allowing only licensed shops to operate but with severe restrictions on their appearance and conduct. The fact that most of these bans have been enforced or attempted in BJP-ruled states is indicative of the way in which the party not only wants to control dietary habits but also engage in moral policing by constantly challenging the norms of cultural purity and pollution.

Bihar has never had an explicit idea of vegetarianism like one found in Gujarat. In fact, fish, more than meat, has been an integral part of maithili culture spanning across major cities like Darbhanga, Muzaffarpur, Bhagalpur etc. Although Gandhi has a close connection with Bihar due to the Champaran Satyagrah, however, his ideas of vegetarianism, aided by the mass following of the Vaishnavism under the influence of the Swaminarayan Sampradaya, were never as popular in Bihar as they have been in Gujarat. Despite such prevalence of vegetarianism over large parts of the society, a ban on the sale of non-vegetarian food by street food vendors in Ahmedabad, enforced by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation in 2021, was challenged in the Gujarat High court and subsequently revoked. This brings us to the question of stakeholders and objectives for such bans.

The case of Ahmedabad non-veg street food ban in 2021 exposed the various ways in which the state authorities were exploiting the street food vendors by seizing their carts under various anti-encroachment drives. The ban was discriminatory against street vendors of all hues by subjecting them to various disciplinary measures of the government and those selling non-vegetarian foods had been marginalised further owing to the food that they sold. A collective of street food vendors filed a case at the Gujarat High Court contesting the decision, and in December 2021, the Court ruled against the directive claiming that the government did not have the right to interfere in the eating choices of people. Furthermore, it instructed the government to return the confiscated laris of the vendors, restoring normalcy. While legal rights of street vendors seem to have been restored for the time being, the othering of people on the basis of their dietary preferences continue unabated, as even now citizens who eat non vegetarian food find it difficult to secure rental spaces in many urban areas of Ahmedabad and other major cities.

In a largely rural state like Bihar with only about 11 % of its population in urban areas, urbanity is quite unevenly spread, thereby making the enforcement of this ban in urban spaces even more ambiguous. The Swachhta Sarvekshan Report of the Government of India 2024-25, divides Bihar’s urban population into following broad categories:- Patna as a city with million plus population city, Gaya, Muzaffarpur, Bihar Sharif and Bhagalpur as 4 Big cities with a population of 3 lakh to 10 lakh people, 59 cities including Darbhanga, Begusarai, Hajipur etc as medium cities with a population between 50000 - 3 lakh and 68 cities as small cities with a population of 20000-50000 people. Among these hundreds of designated urban areas, only Patna and Gaya fare reasonably well on national indexes of cleanliness and garbage-free certifications. All the remaining cities, big, medium or small, fare very poorly on the national scale of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. It seems quite convenient then to divert accountability away from several municipal authorities and nagar panchayats that have spent huge resources in sanitation and cleanliness drives without credible achievements and focus on the sellers of meat and fish as a scapegoat instead.

Such a diversionary order is going to affect people from the marginalized communities like the Mallahs and nishads who are primarily fishermen but who often also try to earn a livelihood by selling fish in their makeshift shops next to highways, especially at the peripheries of city limits. Being a state with an abundance of flowing rivers throughout its territory, it is quite common for such riverine communities to squat with their daily catch in open markets or at the edges of designated market spaces to make a living. In the absence of designated mechanisms to resettle or re-establish such and integrate them into more formal market structures provided by the state, the enforcement of such a ban may only make such communities like the nishads and other lower OBC castes as more vulnerable against an extractive police force. The initial stringent norms of the prohibition policy, which have now been subsequently relaxed over the years, have already shown that the most marginalized communities were also the most vulnerable through heavy handed enforcements of well-intentioned laws. The discretionary enforcements of such bans also have a potential for discrimination on the basis of religion and increase the vulnerability of minority groups to further harassment thereby increasing conflict in the society. Depriving the poor and marginalized, who often buy from such makeshift shops, an easy access from their cheap access to protein is yet another ill effect of such a ban in a state ravaged with malnutrition and protein deficiency.

Sarthak Bagchi is a Political Researcher and Analyst based in Ahmedabad. He teaches courses on Indian Politics, Democracy and Global Populism.

Atmadeep Sengupta is a Doctoral Scholar of Anthropology at Brunel University, London.

Views expressed are personal