MUMBAI, INDIA, September 21, 2007: If you are vegetarian and live in Mumbai, you would most likely live in an apartment in one of Mumbai’s strictly vegetarian only residential complexes. “While Mumbai is one of India’s most cosmopolitan cities, much of its housing is splintered along ethnic and religious lines. There are predominantly Muslim, Roman Catholic and Hindu areas. And then there are extensive vegetarian-only stretches, some of which occupy desirable patches of real estate along the waterfront. Such divisions have long been a feature of life in Mumbai, where around a third of the city is estimated to be vegetarian-because they are Jain by religion, members of the Hindu Marwari business community, or Hindus originally from northern state of Gujurat, all groups that renounce meat, fish and eggs,” the news release explains.
The article points out that,”Vegetarianism in India is far removed from the animal-rights vegetarianism of the West. It is usually a marker of religious identity, handed down over generations, inherited at birth, rather than adopted for reasons of personal health or concern for animal welfare.”
Up until the last fifteen years, vegetarianism was part of a family’s tradition and children followed their parent’s example. However with the rise in income published government research says that, “Households eating chicken increased threefold in urban areas and two and a half times in rural areas between 1993 and 2005.”
In an effort to stop the trend, Mumbai’s vegetarian sector has become more militant and has been known to do such things as “organizing visits to slaughterhouses, to persuade flesh eaters to return to the fold.” Nirmala Mehta, a Marwari housewife who lives in another apartment block with 200 fellow vegetarians, a few kilometers away in north Mumbai, adds, “I’d have issues living next to a non-vegetarian person. The smell would be a problem, but it’s more than that. A non-vegetarian person eats hot blood and it makes him hot blooded; he might not keep control of his emotions.”
However Majeed Memon, a leading Muslim lawyer adds, “They should be discouraged. It’s very sad if, under the guise of vegetarianism, residents are excluding people of a particular religion.”
Mahendra Jain, a lawyer and vegetarian activist concludes, “There is a lot of false publicity coming on television, saying that non-veg food is better than veg. It’s part of the process of Westernization. There are advertisements for McDonalds everywhere.It’s like drug addiction. You taste it, once or twice, and then you get an idea that you must have it. We have to fight this.”