In the rest of the world, “food police” is a term used to describe voices that try to dictate what other people should not eat. But increasingly in India, the directives of the food police are not discretionary: you cannot choose to ignore them and continue to enjoy whatever your palette desires.

It could literally be the police who decide which days of the week or season in the year you cannot eat certain foods. They determine how far you will have to travel to buy forbidden foods. They could raid your fridge and even bulldoze your home for storing food items offensive to majoritarian taste. It matters little what the law says.

This is occurring in a global era of food apartheid, as the rich indulge their latest diet fads but the poor and minorities grapple with regimes that determine what they can consume. This is obvious from the fast food-induced obesity epidemics for the African-Americans and famines manufactured through wars and blockades in Gaza, South Sudan or Yemen – each category of powerless people has a diet cooked up by the tastes of their oppressors. The texture of this hypocrisy is as complex as a billionaire’s beluga caviar.

Take the case of mid-day meals for children in government schools in India. The scheme aimed to ensure nutrition for deprived millions but is now subject to raucous debates about whether they should include eggs. The discussions are comparable in pitch and fervour to the arguments in the US about school shootings and gun regulation.

University hostel dining halls have today become major arenas of student politics, not because they are spaces for debate but because they are where majoritarian food cultures are being imposed and then resisted.

Even as the thalis of some Indians have been turned into a minefield of discriminatory food laws and policies, well-publicised gastronomic adventures are playing out on the chinaware of the elite. Instagram is flooded with images of smoothies blessed by rational-scientific sounding dieticians whose celebrity clients look abnormally ethereal. Edible gold dust or bottles of gold water are not just food – they are a declaration that ingestion by the wealthy transcends the mundane act of eating and drinking.

According to the estimates in the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022 report, a staggering 189.2 million people in India – about 14% of the total population – are undernourished. Of the world’s zero food children who have not eaten anything in a day, half live in India – 6.7 million to be precise.

In November 2023, when the Union Government extended the entitlement of 5 kg of free grains under the National Food Security Act to 81.35 crore poor people for another five years, it was publicised as an immense personal favour by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

In this Orwellian scenario, the food police have taken it upon themselves to toe the ideological line of the party in power, completely disregarding the Constitution of India. By twisting municipal rules beyond recognition, the police in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states are ladling out communal bias into every aspect of food production, display, sale and consumption.

Many Muslims, if they do not have artisanal or skill-based jobs, can be found hawking cheap consumables. They sell vegetables or run small shops selling simple snacks or meals. These self-employed individuals eke out a meagre living by selling dishes subsidised by their lack of capital and backbreaking labour.

Since the tsunami of state-led anti-Muslim propaganda in 2020 during the Covid lockdown, they have been working under siege-like conditions created by organised and informal Hindutva vigilantism, made more acute by a wider job crisis. They are further squeezed out of livelihoods by discriminatory bans and arbitrary law enforcement in the name of law and order, and hygiene.

If the official memos leave any ambiguity about their anti-Muslim designs, statements issued by Hindutva groups helpfully explain that the motivation is forced ritual purity and communal animus. These radicals openly express anti-Muslim rhetoric but their casteist motivations are also obvious, given that the meat and leather industries have a great many Dalit workers too.

Since 2017, when Adityanath became the chief minister of the state, the Uttar Pradesh police have come up with outrageously innovative acts every kanwar season that have no mention in the state police manual or any law. For instance, it has become an annual ritual for them to shower flower petals from helicopters on the pilgrims, who walk enormous distances carrying water from sacred rivers to significant Shiva temples.

In 2023, all the meat shops along the route of the yatra were shut down for the entire fortnight of the pilgrimage season. This year, administrations in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand mandated that all shops and establishments must display the names of their owners and workers, so that the kanwariyas can choose to avoid Muslim vendors and shopkeepers without any effort.

The Supreme Court stayed these directives on Monday but such decisions by the police lend impunity to economic boycotts of Muslims powered by caste revulsion of food practices of other communities. By playing nanny to the mostly poor and lower caste Hindu young men who undertake the kanwar pilgrimage, the food police is endorsing bigotry. The state’s patronage of these young pilgrims distracts from the hunger around them and normalises untouchability – at the expense of poor Muslims.

It’s a revolting paradox: the rich are free to feast on their anything-made-remarkable-by-the-price-tag delicacies and the rest are being made to participate in dystopian hunger games.

While the opposition party leaders and commentators have decried this communal move by the police, we should not forget that the forced closure of meat shops during the Hindu month of Sawan, or facilitating boycotts of select businesses contravenes the freedom of occupation as well as the freedom of conscience of citizens guaranteed in the Indian Constitution.

Watching those who are supposed to protect us turn into instruments to perpetuate oppression is a bitter pill to swallow, but impunity breeds helplessness both in its victims and witnesses. For those who believe that culinary freedom should be a mark of humanity and not a privilege, the police-mandated nameplates of the Muslim hawkers on the kanwar route should have been the cue to stop and pay to eat as an act of solidarity.

Bon appétit.

Ghazala Jamil is an assistant professor at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance at Jawaharlal Nehru University.