These days, the hubris of Hindutva seems to be crossing all bounds. When Indian diplomacy hovers at its nadir, it still does not hesitate to play its civilizational monkey tricks. At the recently concluded BRICS Summit in New Delhi, the gala dinner hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the visiting heads of member states was entirely vegetarian — khandvi mille-feuille, khumb galouti, paneer lababdar, millet pulao and jalebi, built around a “Shree Anna” millet theme. It was clearly intended to show off India’s civilisational superiority. The display was not merely an attempt to impose the food culture of a handful of Brahmanical castes; it also reflected Modi’s own preference for millet being projected as India’s food culture. Millet is indeed a staple of the poor in India. But that is not what it represented at Bharat Mandapam. The poor were, as usual, hidden behind the special screen that ran for kms along the VIP route. The visiting guests, except China’s Xi Jinping, who excused himself, saw it through as they do Modi’s physical overtures as diplomacy. But the audacity of the act was not lost on the people. Since Hindutva forces captured power at the centre in 2014, they have been autocratically imposing their ill-informed notion of Indian civilisation on the people. This has ranged from replacing markers associated with India’s history with those associated with Hindutva and Modi’s persona. It has been driven by the RSS, which speaks as though it were the fountainhead of all universal wisdom. Vegetarianism, of course, has been its obsession and over the years it has displaced or undermined non-vegetarian food in many institutional spaces. It had even gone to the extent of removing eggs from the children’s’ mid-day meals served in schools. This onslaught of a distorted representation of India’s civilisation has been going on for years with brute force. It is a part of a broader project of cultural standardisation – one that obscures or misrepresents identifiable caste origins of many such practices.Bogey of vegetarianismLike many of Hindutva’s projections, the claim of vegetarianism as a defining feature of Indian culture is also based on a highly selective representation of reality. The Pew Research Centre’s 2021 survey on religion in India found that a majority of Indians do not identify as vegetarian at all: when asked directly, 61% said no, against 39% who said yes, including 44% of Hindus. Self-identified vegetarianism also varies sharply by region. Majorities of Hindus in the western, central and northern regions call themselves vegetarian, but far fewer do so in the east, northeast and south.India’s own National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21) tells the same story. Among adults aged 15-49, 83.4% of men and 70.6% of women reported eating non-vegetarian food daily, weekly or occasionally — up from 78.4% of men in the 2015-16 round. Weekly meat consumption climbed sharply too: 57.3% of men and 45.1% of women ate fish, chicken or meat at least once a week, up from 48.9% and 42.8% five years earlier. Regional variation is stark – Lakshadweep, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Goa, Kerala and Puducherry report the highest rates of non-vegetarian eating, while Haryana, Punjab, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh report the lowest. Even within Hinduism, the majority position is non-vegetarian: 52.5% of Hindu men and 40.7% of Hindu women reported eating meat, fish or eggs regularly. Egg consumption, which many purity-minded campaigns treat as equivalent to meat, is higher still: 84.7% of men and 72% of women reported eating eggs daily, weekly or occasionally.Public health researchers examining the gap between this data and official rhetoric have argued that state administrations promoting vegetarianism have relied on a narrative that non-vegetarians are a small minority, despite data showing the opposite. Whatever one’s view of the underlying politics, the statistical claim at the heart of this essay – that a large majority of Indians eat non-vegetarian food, and that this majority is growing rather than shrinking — is well supported by the government’s own survey instrument.Connection with cow politicsVegetarianism as a marker of Indian civilisational identity acquires a sharper political meaning when placed alongside Hindutva’s politics around the cow. This policy began by banning cow slaughter and beef eating with stringent penal provisions for violations, using the Article 48 of the Constitution. Beef consumption then became an especially convenient marker for identifying the Muslim as the cultural Other. The fact that beef is consumed not only by Muslims but also by Dalits, Adivasis and other communities is politically inconvenient to this construction, since these communities form part of the wider Hindu constituency. Therefore, beef eating is then increasingly represented as a specifically Muslim practice, while the cow is presented as the embodiment of Hindu civilisation. In this way, a question of food is transformed into a question of identity, and a question of identity into a politics of exclusion.The process does not end with cow protection. Once beef is successfully marked as the food of the Muslim Other, the opposite dietary practice can gradually be elevated into a marker of civilised and authentic Indian identity. Vegetarianism, historically associated with particular religious, caste and regional communities, is presented as the dietary identity of India as a whole. Cow politics thus complements the broader Hindutva project of cultural standardisation.Institutional vegetarianismA number of documented instances have revealed institutional policy pushing vegetarianism in the country.One of the most notable instances is the removal of eggs from the Mid-Day Meal Scheme (rebranded PM POSHAN), a free cooked lunch that is often the most reliable source of daily protein for its recipients. In mid-2026, the newly elected BJP government of West Bengal handed the scheme’s food contract to ISKCON, the Hare Krishna organisation, whose strictly vegetarian menu treats eggs on par with meat. Eggs were duly stripped from the meals of roughly 12 million pupils. The backlash from teachers, nutritionists and parents was strong enough that the state reversed course within weeks, restoring eggs while keeping the vegetarian charity’s meals in place alongside them. This was not an isolated episode. In 2023, a circular reducing egg provision in Karnataka drew criticism from student organisations. Bihar temporarily removed eggs citing bird flu. And Maharashtra amended its egg policy after representations from Jain religious groups, ultimately requiring 40% student consent before eggs could be served at all and exempting schools served by ISKCON-affiliated charities. There were attempts to push vegetarianism in the institutions of higher education. India’s premier technical institutes have repeatedly become sites of dietary segregation. At IIT Bombay, a 2018 hostel directive asked students to use separate ”tray type” plates for non-vegetarian food; in 2023, its mess council reserved six of 129 tables exclusively for vegetarian diners. It prompted a student protest in which demonstrators ate non-vegetarian food at a reserved table and were subsequently fined. At IIT Madras in 2018, a mess introduced separate entrances, utensils and wash basins for vegetarian and non-vegetarian students. It provoked the Ambedkar Periyar Study Circle to liken the arrangement to the historical two-entrance system separating upper castes from those deemed impure. At IIT Kharagpur, a 2024 hall directive instituted seating segregation after complaints that non-vegetarian eaters at vegetarian tables were causing discomfort. The institute revoked the notice only after an alumni protest. The near-identical recurrence of these episodes across India’s most elite public institutions, each disavowed by administrations only after mobilisation led by Ambedkarite student groups explicitly invoking the language of caste untouchability, suggests a pattern rather than isolated misjudgements.Indian Railways has periodically sought vegetarian-only menus on specific days, while several municipal bodies, including Ahmedabad, have at various points tried to restrict the sale of non-vegetarian food on city streets, disproportionately affecting Muslim, Dalit and lower-caste vendors and consumers. In many cities, it has become normal for new residential complexes to openly exclude Muslims, and more implicitly, Dalits and Adivasis. Several localities have banned selling meat and eggs in their vicinity. As a result, the urban environment, which, since colonial times tended to become a melting pot of castes and communities, is increasingly fragmenting into ghettoes of segregated caste and communities. The historical genealogyThe claim that vegetarianism is a timeless, essential feature of Hindu civilisation is disproved by mainstream historical scholarship. For instance, D.N. Jha’s The Myth of the Holy Cow, which draws on Vedic, Brahmanical, Buddhist and Jaina sources alongside archaeology, provides Vedic references to cattle flesh as a dietary item. For centuries, ritual cow slaughter was not even classified as a form of killing. Meat consumption, including beef, remained common through the late Gupta period, appearing in secular medical and literary texts as unremarkably as vegetables or fruit. Vegetarianism spread more widely only afterward, under pressure from the ahimsa doctrines of Buddhism and Jainism. Babasaheb Ambedkar’s 1948 essay on untouchability and beef-eating, reproduced as an appendix to Jha’s book, argues on textual grounds that in the Vedic period, the Brahmin’s daily fare routinely included beef. Jha situates the cow’s full sacralisation later still, associating it with the cow-protection movements of the 19th century linked to reformers such as Dayananda Saraswati.History shows that in contention with Buddhism and Jainism, the Brahmins reformulated purity norms, which hardened over centuries into a doctrine linking ritual purity, caste status and abstention from certain foods. This doctrine was mobilised in the colonial and nationalist period as a marker of a singular, supposedly ancient, Hindu identity. Ambedkar linked this history directly to caste, arguing that communities later designated untouchable retained beef-eating precisely because caste Hindus had turned abstention into a badge of ritual purity and its absence into a badge of pollution.The economic paradoxThe political promotion of vegetarianism sits awkwardly against India’s material position in the global meat economy. India has the largest bovine population in the world, holding roughly 59% of the world’s buffalo and about 19% of its cattle – first in the world on both counts. Simultaneously, India has been among the world’s largest exporters of bovine meat for over a decade – specifically buffalo meat, or “carabeef,” since cattle slaughter is restricted in most states but buffalo slaughter is not. Exports grew from an average of 0.31 million tonnes in 1999-2001 to an estimated 2.1 million tonnes in 2013-15, narrowly overtaking Brazil as the world’s largest beef exporter by volume in 2014. The trade continues to expand: buffalo meat shipments surged 25.6% to $5.1 billion in 2025-26, the first year the trade crossed the $5 billion mark, with new markets opening in Egypt, Uzbekistan and Russia alongside established markets such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, the UAE and Bangladesh. It may be noted that this commercial buffalo-meat export industry is owned by both Muslim as well as non-Muslims, including Hindus. The animals involved are overwhelmingly economically spent dairy stock – buffaloes past their productive milking years, infertile animals, or male calves that are uneconomical to maintain. The cow protection politics rather has resulted into huge dent to farmers’ income, torture of animals and waste of exchequers’ fund towards maintenance of gaushalas that benefit only RSS affiliates. It aggravates the nutritional state of Indians who are deprived of cheaper sources of proteins in cattle meat. The same political ecosystem that removes eggs from a children’s plate in schools benefits from a multi-billion-dollar bovine meat export industry.Conclusion The vegetarian spectacle at the BRICS dinner may have gratified the cultural ego of the Hindutva establishment, but it illustrates a larger problem – the increasing tendency to turn diplomacy into an extension of domestic ideological projection. Over the past 12 years, foreign policy has become increasingly personalised and, on occasions, performative, with the image of India and its prime minister becoming inseparable in this ruse. Recent scholarship has pointed to the growing centralisation and personalisation of foreign-policy decision-making under Modi. Diplomacy depends on credibility, consistency and the ability to distinguish national interests from the ideological preferences of the government of the day. When civilisational symbolism, majoritarian identity and the projection of the prime minister’s persona begin to dominate the diplomatic message, they obscure the country’s actual strategic interests. As a consequence, India increasingly finds itself isolated even in its own neighbourhood. This is evident in its irrational accommodation of Trump’s erratic demands and, more seriously, in the apparent abandonment of its long-standing civilisational relationship with Iran in favour of Netanyahu’s Israel. History may well record these episodes as lessons in how diplomacy should not be conducted.The Hindutva forces mistake India’s visibility due to its demography and market for diplomatic influence. India possesses enormous civilisational depth, but civilisation becomes diplomatic capital only when it is presented as an inclusive and credible source of values, not as evidence of cultural superiority. Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.