Regional authorities had temporarily banned selling meat from Aug 24 to Sept 1 due to a Jain festival.

Midway through, a court said meat sellers could still do business, but many opted to stay closed or operate undercover out of fear.

Imroz was keeping his shutter half-open, just in case anyone not observing the festival came looking for some chicken – potential sales he could not afford to miss.

Pressure on meat merchants is growing in a country under heavy Hindu nationalist influence, starting at the top with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government.

Imroz lamented that while owners of small shops like himself are left to suffer economically, authorities have not prohibited the sale of frozen meat in supermarkets.

“Doesn’t this mean they want to punish us for our choice of occupation? Knowing well that butchers are predominantly Muslim?” he asked.

The meat bans are part of the rise of what some call “vegetarian nationalism”, whereby right-wing Hindu groups such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal tie an anti-meat agenda to Indian identity itself.

These groups are closely linked to the BJP, which insists that it works to serve all Indians regardless of ethnicity or religion.

Some experts see the push for vegetarianism as part of a wider pressure campaign against the country’s minority Muslim population, who make up about 15% of the total.

In 2021, a Pew Research Center report found that only 39% of Indians were vegetarians, implying that not all Hindus shun meat.

While beef has always been an issue of contention for Hindus and is banned in many Indian states, since the arrival of the Modi government in 2014, the battle has come to include any and all nonvegetarian items.

The political doctrine of Hindutva, which aims to turn India into a Hindu nation, is rooted in the Rashtriya Swayamevak Sangh, an organisation that is the ideological parent of the BJP.

Hindutva considers meat consumption to be anti-Hindu and thus anti-India.

Vegetarian nationalists reprimand those who consume meat – Muslims, Dalits, Christians and Adivasis – to coerce them to conform.

Apoorvanand, a political commentator and professor at the University of Delhi who goes by one name, says this connection between Indian culture and vegetarianism is a fabrication.

He says the nationalists are constructing a culture that shames those who consume nonvegetarian food – an “opportunistic vegetarianism” that is promoted militantly in some regions and not in others.

“They want to establish their religious habits over everyone and cripple Muslims economically,” he said.

Recent years have brought several examples of bans like the one in Haryana.

On April 4, in Delhi, an elected representative from the BJP declared a ban on the sale of meat throughout the nine days of the Hindu festival of Chaitra Navratri.

In October 2021, during the Sharad Navratri festival, right-wing outfits forced Muslims to shut their meat shops in several northern Indian cities.

That November, in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, authorities issued orders to remove all roadside shacks selling nonvegetarian food unless it was “properly covered”, arguing that seeing poultry items would offend Hindus’ religious sensibilities.

Even when no explicit orders are issued, some cautious Muslims shut their meat shops during Hindu festivals, wary of being fined or worse.

Asked about the financial drain sellers face, the head of a Hindu organisation in Haryana argued that “those who want to sell meat should be relocated out of the city and do so in a separate market”, referring to the city of Gurugram.

Mahavir Bhardwaj is the state president of the Sanyukt Hindu Sangharsh Samiti, Haryana, an organisation that has called for banning meat sales in open spaces and spearheaded a campaign to ban issuances of new meat seller licences in Gurugram.

“When vegetarians see slaughtered meat hanging in front of these meat shops, it offends them, makes them want to throw up,” said Bhardwaj, who describes himself as a proud Hindu citizen.

The spread of vegetarian nationalism has coincided with a spate of violence against Muslims in general.

Mohammad Asif Khan, an independent hate crime tracker, documented over 400 hate crimes against Muslims in the country over the last four years.

Muneeb, another butcher who, like Imroz, asked to be identified by only his first name for fear of reprisals, told Nikkei Asia that during the Navratri 2021 meat ban he and his brother were nearly beaten by a gang of 10 to 12 people who wore saffron scarves and chanted Hindu mantras.

“We own a shop in Ghaziabad. On the day before the festival, goons threatened us to close us down,” Muneeb said.

Ghaziabad is in the state of Uttar Pradesh, whose chief minister Yogi Adityanath, also a BJP leader, is a firebrand Hindu monk who ran the Hindu Yuva Vahini, an outfit accused of fanning communal tension.

“Our plight was that even when the local authorities had reversed the ban, we couldn’t escape these goons, so helplessly, we closed down and couldn’t even earn a rupee that week,” Muneeb said.

While the meat bans may be temporary, for India’s more than 200 million Muslims, they raise longer-term worries about what India stands for, how its culture is defined and whether they have a place in both the economy and society.

Apoorvanand, the professor, said that for the Hindu nationalists, “this is not about going vegetarian, this is not about their love for animals, or country, rather it is about establishing their power, being able to enforce their way of life on everyone”.