How Vegans can win or lose in India

In 1919 Mahatma Gandhi faced a dilemma. The importance of his work in India was steadily rising, but his health was in shambles. The Kheda satyagraha of 1918 had been gruelling and was followed by a bad attack of dysentery. He was too weak for the major work that he knew lay ahead.

His doctor now told him bluntly that he needed more protein in his diet and, since he refused meat or even eggs, and had problems digesting dal, it had to come from milk. But years before Gandhi had been disgusted at learning about phooka, or “cowblowing”, a traditional dairying practice around the world, where air is forcibly blown into the cow’s vagina to stimulate milk-production. Gandhi vowed not to consume the products of such perverse violence.

Gandhi could not break this vow, yet wished to stay alive for his work. His wife Kasturba proposed a solution that might convince that part of his mind trained in legal hair-splitting. When he made his vow, he was thinking of cows, and also buffaloes, but what about goats? Gandhi accepted that his vow had not been made with goats in mind and so he could consume their milk and survive.


This decision saved his health and sustained him during all the years of struggle to follow (and caused endless problems for the people around him who had to arrange a constant stream of lactating goats). But Gandhi knew he had compromised on his ideals: “the memory of this action even now rankles in my breast and fills me with remorse, and I am constantly thinking how to give up goat’s milk,” he wrote in his autobiography. Gandhi’s dilemma was that he was by inclination a vegan before the concept existed. It is a sign of how genuinely radical veganism is, even in the one country with long traditions of vegetarianism and proscriptions against animal slaughter.

India might seem to offer ideal grounds for the growth of veganism. There is major political support against animal slaughter, abattoirs are almost suffocatingly regulated and there are shops, apartments, neighbourhoods and even whole towns which are entirely meat and egg-free.

But as Gandhi understood, a true focus on animal welfare requires looking beyond just slaughter to how animals are treated — and whether we can lead a truly moral life if we acquiesce in their ill-treatment. Vegetarianism simply avoids eating animals, but veganism also asks us to consider how we allow them to live and here India offers much less hope.

We might have more vegetarians than anywhere else in the world, yet ignore dogs tortured by crackers and burned alive, elephants chained and forced to beg, battery chickens turned into immobile egg production machines, calves removed from milking cows and bull calves abandoned, horses half-starved, yet used for rides and the whole horrific spectrum of living animal exploitation we see every day. Few people would explicitly support such cruelty but, unlike Gandhi who grappled with his guilt, most of us implicitly allow it to happen.


In his new book How to Create a Vegan World, Tobias Leenaert explains that the cognitive dissonance this sets up gets resolved in two ways. First, there is justification: “People attempt, sometimes successfully, to believe in lies and half-truths as rationalizations: ‘the animals die a quick death’, ‘they are raised for meat’, ‘they don’t feel as much as we do’.…” And, second, there is distancing: “We detach ourselves from the animals we eat and avoid emotional intimacy. We conceal factory farms and slaughterhouses. We misrepresent animals in order to make exploiting them easier.…”

The Anti-Greens
Another tactic is to get aggressive with vegans. There’s a long history of disdain and derision of vegans, with jokes about famously awful attempts to devise vegan versions of foods like cheese, diatribes about the difficulty of vegans at dinner parties and complaints about their aggressive activism. The late food writer Anthony Bourdain described them as “Hezbollah-like” food terrorists. Some of these reactions can be understood.

Vegan food is often at its least enticing when trying to emulate non-vegan foods and, as with any new trend, lack of knowledge of vegan recipes or how to find vegan ingredients can cause catering problems. But the strength of reaction against vegans is extreme and does suggest an attempt to avoid unsettling truth in their arguments. The British food writer and editor William Sitwell recently provided an example of such extreme reactions. In response to an article pitch from a vegan writer, he suggested: “How about a series on killing vegans, one by one. Ways to trap them? How to interrogate them properly? Expose their hypocrisy?


Force-feed them meat?” When his comments were exposed on Twitter he tried to claim it as a private joke — yet any humour is hard to see and the comments came in the context of a professional exchange between an editor and a writer. But it was what happened next that signalled a real change in vegan acceptance in the UK. Sitwell is a well-established food writer, with 20 years of experience with a food magazine published by the Waitrose supermarket chain, two fine books to his name and regular appearances on food TV shows. Yet, soon after his remarks surfaced he lost his job.

This was probably not unconnected to the fact that Waitrose was increasingly targeting the vegetarian and vegan food market with a wide new product range, with reports of an 85 per cent increase in sales.

Stick to Your Plants
In the US, plant-based foods — to use the new umbrella term — account for over $3.7 billion, with a 17 per cent increase in sales, compared with just 2 per cent for overall food products.


The estimates of how many US consumers identify as vegan range from 1 per cent to 6 per cent — which might seem small, until you consider this is a country where McDonald’s beef burgers and Kentucky fried chicken were long seen as defining foods. In fact, iconic burger chains like White Castle (made famous by the Harold & Kumar film, starring Kal Penn) now offer vegan burgers.

Vegan food is now increasingly described as delicious — not least because of the use of many products familiar to Indians, like green jackfruit and banana flowers.


Being vegan is not just easier now, but even aspirational with many prominent vegan celebrities. As always, the entertainment industry is in the forefront of trendy diets, with Miley Cyrus, Ellen DeGeneres and Liam Hemsworth all counting as long-term vegans. Vegans now include business leaders, politicians and even sportspeople like Venus Williams and Virat Kohli — a powerful counter to the old norm of meat being essential to strength.


This is an extraordinary change, and yet it raises questions. One thing making vegan activists uncomfortable is that many of the new converts are doing it for reasons of health or environmental concerns. These have always been cited by vegans as side benefits — so does it matter when they become central, while animal issues become secondary (or don’t come up at all)?

Another is the fact that many are only partly vegan. Leenaert points out that the numbers of those identifying as occasionally vegetarian or vegan is 10 times the size of the purists. For a position based on a moral issue, this seems unacceptable; as some activists ask, would anyone see anything positive in someone who claims to be only a part-time sexual abuser?

Leenaert’s book attempts to answer this through a respectful engagement with the purist approach — which he personally follows — combined with a plea for pragmatism.



He points to how a wider consumer base, even if they are only part-time vegans, has led to greater availability of vegan foods in shops and restaurants, which benefits the purists and makes it easier for others to become vegan. Leenaert notes how purely moral arguments make few converts compared to arguments with more tangible appeals.

Vegan activists often compare their cause to the anti-slavery movement, but Leenaert points out that the first really big international anti-slavery success came from British activists focusing on banning the trade in slaves, rather than slavery itself (this story is told in the 2006 film Amazing Grace). This allowed British ships to pursue foreign slave ships, appealing both to British patriotism and the monetary interest of the crews who could claim the value of the ships. And over time this built to a broader abolitionist appeal.

Most of all, Leenaert invokes the ultimate aim of saving animals and makes a key point: “as a group, meat reducers save more animals than vegetarians and vegans.” With purist plant eaters in the minority by far, more animals are saved by getting meat eaters to eat less meat and more plants.

Animal’s Sake
This impact isn’t just on killing but also on how animals are treated. In the US elections this month, voters in California passed a measure requiring that all eggs sold in the state come from cage-free chickens. This is far from ending the confinement of chickens or the consumption of eggs yet, but given the cultural impact of the state, it is a major acknowledgement that how chickens are treated matters Leenaert’s arguments have been formulated for the West, where vegetarians and vegans have had to operate from positions of little power.

It is tempting for activists in India to see this as less relevant here, where there is a political and social base to build on. Yet this might be a mistake if, as Leenaert emphasises, the real aim of the vegan movement must be reducing animal suffering.

The truth is that, for all the considerable institutional support for vegetarianism — compulsory vegetarian menus on certain days on Indian railways, bans on eggs in school meals in Madhya Pradesh, periodic closure of and regular raids on abattoirs — the number of meat eaters in India is high. According to a report by IndiaSpend, 80 per cent of Indian men and 70 per cent of Indian women eat some form of meat or eggs regularly, even if our regular diets remain mostly vegetarian.

India might represent the reverse position of vegetarians in developed nations, but the gains of this position of power will be squandered if it can’t convince the hugely growing consumer segment of the value of keeping meat consumption low. And the way to waste this chance will be if, as is happening, the appeals to avoiding meat focus on negative rather than positive approaches. Vegans are winning abroad by making their food tasty, healthy, glamorous, affordable and the moral choice — not by making it hard for people to eat meat.

Leenaert doesn’t discount the impact that forced choices can have. In one fascinating example, he recounts how some people became allergic to some kinds of meat after suffering from a tick bite, and being forced to avoid meat made them realise that the alternatives weren’t that bad. But in general, change is the most effective when it comes voluntarily and perhaps in stages. (Among other things, he notes that people who suddenly turn fully vegan quite often abandon it as fast.)

Gandhi would have endorsed this approach. For all his passionate commitment to vegetarianism — which might have been veganism if better alternatives to milk were available then — he viewed forcing people to change their food habits as a form of violence in itself. In a letter to a friend in July 1926, he considered the problem of “what happens when, in a non-vegetarian family, the husband becomes a vegetarian out of religious principle. Should the wife follow, against her will, what the husband has accepted as his dharma?”

Gandhi concluded that the answer was no. He felt that the husband “should maintain an attitude of detachment and even help the wife to have her non-vegetarian food”. Gandhi’s constant principle was to persuade people to change their habits, sometimes even with highly emotional arguments, but people have to make that choice. It might not be the easy approach, but it was the way to create the truly lasting change that the cause deserved.