I am not sure if the UP Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, who has effected a crackdown on illegal abattoirs, has read The Sexual Politics of Meat by Carol J Adams.

First published in 1990, the book is known for its extreme positions and incendiary language against meat-eating, such as “the rape of animals” and “the butchering of women.” Carol J Adams wrote: “Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes.”

Environmentalism has now been added to the compelling aesthetic logic against meat-eating. Had the animal-loving CM argued instead that producing a single calorie of beef requires eight or more calories of grainfeed and that expanded meat consumption has a multiplier effect on the demand for grains, he would have appeared to be fashionable and not so culturally orthodox.

Yogi Adityanath might as well enjoy reading JM Coetzee’s novel, Elizabeth Costello, marked by strong criticism against the eating of carcasses. Given the caveat that meat causes a drain on grain and that red meat can increase one’s cholesterol level, this book can prove to be the mantra for the forced path to vegetarianism.

Yogi Adityanath’s moral crusade can find resonance from unseemly quarters and can be supported on completely different grounds. Supermarkets with meat counters full of scores of different cuts (or entire eviscerated carcasses) of at least half a dozen mammalian and avian species (cattle, pig, sheep, chicken, turkey, duck) on display, point to a degree of carnivory that might appear completely distasteful not only to those who are averse to meat-eating but also to those who might find it an affront to their sense of aesthetics.

In the West, delicatessen sections display an enormous variety of processed meat products. This is visually stimulating. The domination of fast-food outlets and ubiquitous burger chains in India might partly justify the findings of the wellknown 2006 CSDS survey on food that a whopping 69 per cent Indians are non-vegetarian. An estimated 55 per cent of Brahmins are non-vegetarians.

Homer wrote in the Odyssey that when the Greeks and Trojans weren’t fighting they often enjoyed a few plump, well-turned sausages grilled over the campfire.

Constantine banned sausages shortly after he inherited the Roman Empire. Uttar Pradesh has emerged as the country’s market leader in terms of production and export of meat. Historian DD Kosambi in his Ancient India (1965) averred that “Vedic Brahmins had fattened upon a steady diet of sacrificed beef”.

But the Far Right in India would have none of either Kosambi or DN Jha, the latter arguing in his well-researched work, Holy Cow: Beef in Indian Dietary Traditions, that the ‘holiness’ of the cow is a myth and its flesh was very much part of the early Indian non-vegetarian food regimen and dietary traditions.

And more importantly, long before the advent of Islam in India, beef had been associated with Indian dietary practices. His survey of ancient Indian scriptures, especially the Vedas, shows that amongst the nomadic, pastoral Aryans who settled here, animal sacrifice was a dominant feature till the emergence of settled agriculture.

“No serious historian, not even ‘Hindu’ ones like RC Majumdar or KM Munshi, has ever disputed that ancient Hindus ate beef,” Jha once said furnishing evidence that cow slaughter and consumption by Hindus of all classes, including Brahmins, continued as late as the 19th century. Therefore, Yogi Adityanath’s crusade against meat-eating, or to be more precise beef-eating, reeks of vegetarian Brahminical Hinduism.

It bears recall that Prime Minister Morarji Desai’s Janata government had passed legislation banning alcohol and the eating of beef.

The consumption of beef is one of the most affordable sources of nutrition. This must be realised by the ardent proponents of Hindutva. Apart from Maharashtra, where both meat and fish are widely consumed, Bengalis and Kashmiri Brahmins or coastal Brahmins like the fish-eating Saraswats would almost certainly oppose strictures on their dietary practices.

Only some two years back, the Jammu bench of the state High Court directed the administration to enforce a decades-old beef ban that has been on the statute book since the days before Independence. The Ranbir Penal Code was revived, and this gave the political Opposition and the separatists enough ammunition in the Muslim-majority state.

But the food politics is bound to circumscribe the whole of India if one considers that about eight states, mostly in the Northeast and Bengal and Kerala, allow unrestricted cow slaughter while the rest have some form of restriction.

The story goes that Jinnah was once offered a box of ham sandwiches for lunch. He exclaimed that if the voters came to know that he was going to eat ham for lunch, he did not have a “ghost of a chance” of being elected The founder of Pakistan did have his lunch anyway at Cornaglia’s, a famed Bombay restaurant of the day, and did not hesitate to savour a plate of pork sausages.

But Jinnah was no Mohammad Akhlaq. Nor for that matter was the country then under the overarching control of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. In contrast, much of Mahatma Gandhi’s first month in London was spent in long walks, searching for a vegetarian restaurant as he had to abide by the three vows his mother had advocated ~ to abstain from meat, wine, and women while abroad.

On one occasion, he prepared non-vegetarian food for a Muslim friend on the occasion of Eid, though he himself was a strict vegetarian. Meat politics acquired a new dimension recently when the BJP-ruled Gujarat passed a stringent law making cow slaughter punishable with life imprisonment.

Vikram Saini, a legislator from Uttar Pradesh and coaccused in the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, vowed to break the hands and legs of the apostate who “doesn’t consider the cow to be a mother, or kills cows”. Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh has threatened to “hang cow killers”.

Indeed, the meat politics revolves around a non-existent monolithic Hinduism in the aftermath of the lynching of a Muslim in a village near Delhi for allegedly consuming beef, the revival of legislation banning the sale and consumption of beef in J-K, and now widespread cow vigilantism in UP and elsewhere.

All this is a recipe for disaster not only for the Muslims but for a vast majority of non-vegetarian Hindus. The trends are ominous as Narendra Modi completes three years as the Prime Minister of India.

The writer is a Kolkatabased commentator on politics, development and cultural issues.