BOMBAY, INDIA, May 27, 2006: As this city of 16 million becomes the cosmopolitan main nerve of a booming Indian economy, real estate is increasingly intersecting with cuisine. More middle-class Indians are moving in, more of them are vegetarian, and the law is on their side. “Some people are very strict. They won’t sell to a non-vegetarian even if he offers a higher price than a vegetarian,” said real estate broker Norbert Pinto. Vegetarianism is a centuries-old custom among Hindus, Jains and others in India. The government estimates India has some 220 million vegetarians, more than anywhere else in the world. “Veg or non-veg?” is heard in restaurants, at dinner parties and on airlines. And the question has long been an unwritten part of the interrogation to which house hunters must submit. But it’s becoming more open, and the effects more noticeable, all the more so in Bombay, which attracts immigrants from Gujarat and Rajasthan, strongly vegetarian states, as well as followers of the Jain religion. In constitutionally secular India, there’s no bar to forming a housing society and making an apartment block exclusively Catholic or Muslim, Hindu or Zoroastrian. Vegetarians say they too need segregation. Rejected home seekers have mounted a slew of court challenges to the power of housing societies to discriminate, but last year India’s highest tribunal ruled the practice legal.
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