The egg has become the first casualty of the BJP’s promise to respect Bengal’s food culture.
During the election season, the BJP read the room — and the fish market. Leaders flaunted fish and devoured mutton before television cameras. They assured Bengalis that nobody was coming for their plates. Once the kursi was secured, however, performance yielded to policy and the new government decided that school mid-day meals will no longer include eggs.
The irony would be amusing if the people paying for it were not children.
The new government has entrusted the preparation of mid-day meals in nearly 1,800 Kolkata schools to ISKCON and its Annamrita Foundation. ISKCON runs a vegetarian-only kitchen, meaning eggs will be replaced by paneer, soya, rajma, and pulses to meet children’s protein requirements.
To be fair, ISKCON has done exactly what one would expect of it. It has never hidden its commitment to vegetarian food. Nor is this the first time a religious organisation has insisted on serving meals that reflect its beliefs. The Akshaya Patra Foundation has spent years defending a similar position, even as nutritionists questioned whether ideology should dictate what children eat under a government welfare scheme.
A government has no business following the dietary beliefs of the institution it hires. Mid-day meals are not some kind of religious charity. They are one of independent India’s most successful welfare interventions designed to keep children in school, combat malnutrition, and ensure that poverty does not decide what ends up on a child’s plate and fate. So the menu must answer to public health and children’s needs. And eggs are a perfect solution to that.
But every few years, somewhere in India, the egg is dragged into a political argument. It is too ordinary to inspire passion and too nutritious to ignore. It has survived precisely because it sits in a rare sweet spot: cheap, acceptable across much of India, easy to cook and nutritious. That’s why governments chose them for mid-day meals.
Now, ISKCON’s alternatives are soya and paneer. But the two are not interchangeable with eggs. Doctors have said as much for years. Eggs have valuable nutrients. That is the science. But politics is science’s toughest contender in ‘New India’.
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Food, science, faith
The BJP understood perfectly well during the election that Bengal’s relationship with food is unlike that of many northern states. Food holds a different reverence in Bengal. A fish could be gifted to a bride, offered to goddesses, and cooked for lunch without inviting debate. Outside Bengal, it scandalises those determined to flatten Hinduism into a single vegetarian template.
The Bengali kitchen never developed that anxiety.
Its genius lay in accommodation rather than exclusion, in appetite rather than orthodoxy. Vegetarian and non-vegetarian food coexisted without becoming moral categories. A widow’s austere meal and a Sunday kosha mangsho belonged to the same universe. Food is governed by season, geography, and household custom.
So, politicians, well aware of the maachhe-bhaate Bangali instinct, quickly acquired a taste for mustard oil during campaigns. BJP leaders sampled fish before television cameras because they recognised that Bengal’s culinary habits could not be lectured into submission. They performed familiarity because it carried an electoral cost.
But their governing has been entirely different.
The egg’s exit from school meals shows how quickly symbolic gestures give way to ideological preferences once power is secured. The tragedy is that children have become collateral damage in a debate that was never about them.
Welfare schemes exist because governments are expected to privilege outcomes over beliefs. If science and doctors say eggs are essential for a daily diet in childhood, that should settle the matter. The role of the government’s job is to simply provide it to those who depend on it.
Bengal has always found room for faith at the dining table. It has also known where faith must end and science should prevail.
The kitchen is one thing. The classroom is another.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)