When I first moved to Delhi as a 20-something working professional it took me a while to absorb that people are vegetarian by choice and not by social diktat. The only vegetarians I had grown up seeing were my widowed female relatives, mostly elderly grandmothers. I had almost felt sorry for her when a beautiful young colleague asked for vegetarian food before quickly stumbling to the realisation that all was well with her husband. In my defence, it was a less knowledgeable time, vegetarianism was yet to become political capital and I came from a state that lovingly offers fish and meat even to goddesses, Bengal.The innocence and perhaps ignorance of my growing up years apart, there is something sinister about a bunch of middle-aged men (and women) who were towing whole rohus around the campaign trail and inhaling rice and fish to celebrate their maiden election victory in West Bengal to now wax eloquent about the virtues of vegetarianism.BJP’s Rakesh Singh campaigns with fish. Photo: Video screengrab.The trigger is the handing over of the contract for delivering midday meals in schools in Kolkata Municipal Corporation areas to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) under its Akshay Patra initiative which partners the government of India for the Poshan programme but does not serve animal proteins in its meals. This is a state where 71.4% women were anaemic in 2021, according to the National Family Health Survey 5 – the current edition has not released this data – and about a quarter of children under five years are malnourished, according to the NFHS 6. Thus, truth be told, nutrition levels were clearly far from ideal even with the avowedly non-vegetarian mid-day meal plan. I use the qualifier because a single egg a week – or two – which is what the pre-ISKCON meal plan had, does little or nothing for the nutrition of children who often come from households of very limited means and whose only real meal of the day sometimes is the one they have in the school. It is possible to argue that a government that chooses to alleviate that penury and address the exodus of unskilled workers from West Bengal to feed the domestic worker and rickshaw-puller pipeline in the northern states does much more for the state than the mere tokenism of one or two eggs per week. But the price of one cannot be the other. Also, that tokenism matters. Unlike states like Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh where this banishment of eggs from children’s plates has previously been affected, West Bengal is not a predominantly vegetarian state. While there is no denying that the rampant corruption in the state during the Trinamool Congress regime could hardly have not affected the MDM programme, the trade-off does seem steep for the approximately 80 lakh students who get the meal – some of them young anaemic girls who have just started menstruating and need all the protein they can to make up for the monthly blood loss. Just pumping iron and folic acid under the adolescent health programme is not enough. That their constitutional entitlement to a daily meal can be fulfilled without any siphoning of funds only on condition that they abide by the dietary restrictions followed by a certain religious group is a poor statement of the administrative acumen of the nascent Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state. Not to mention the appalling hypocrisy of that government’s social media cheerleaders whose extravagant and exotic food posts transcend food choice barriers but who are now effusive about the virtues of a filling vegetarian meal as opposed to the food of allegedly poor quality and deficient quantity that reached the students in the earlier era of misappropriation and corruption. Education minister Deepak Barman told the state assembly that eggs are “not the only nutritious component in a meal” and that a “large proportion” of the world’s population thrives on vegetarian meals. That claim is patently incorrect – because leave alone the world, not even in India is vegetarianism the dominant food choice. As for West Bengal, the latest entrant (partial for now) to India’s “vegetarian mid-day meal” club is 98% non vegetarian.Religion and scienceWhich means that the core argument in favour of banishing eggs from MDMs in other states – that vegetarianism is cultural in the country – does not apply to West Bengal. Even the ISKCON defence of their non animal protein menu harking back to the Bhakti movement icon Chaitanya Mahaprabhu hides behind a minuscule religious community in a state where feeding non-vegetarian fare to goddesses is an important worship ritual. Kali is routinely fed a meal of mutton and rice and it is imperative to give one non-vegetarian item to Durga on Nabami as a married daughter cannot leave her paternal home without tasting non-vegetarian food. As for the rajma that ISKCON vice-president Radharaman Das dangled as a counter to the allegation that their meals are protein deficient, many parts of Bengal do not even identify that particular variety of bean.While BJP’s record of scientific temper is not much to write home about, there is of course the minor detail of the science of proteins; the fact is that soya is the only non-animal protein that is “first class,” meaning that it contains all the essential amino acids that the human body cannot produce and needs to get from outside. All other proteins – dal, paneer, etc. – are second class proteins. Vitamin B12, which is important for blood health, is also lacking in vegetarian meals. Over the last 12 years of obsessive propagandist vegetarianism, this science has been killed bit by bit in the northern and occasionally the southern states. It’s now the turn of Bengal. This festival season, when Durga and Kali arrive in new Bengal, they might need to watch out too. Abantika Ghosh is a journalist and public policy professional. Views are personal.