Opinion: IIT Mumbai Could Have Avoided Food Controversy Through Larger Consultation | Sticking Point
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The country’s elite and internationally reputed educational institute, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Mumbai is needlessly mired in a bizarre controversy that has nothing to do with technical or scientific excellence. It is to do with vegetarian and non-vegetarian food being served to the students in the hostel food mess where they eat. Indeed, this absurd issue has been agitating both students and the authorities who are supposed to be focussed on the pursuit of technological learning.
The controversy was sparked by a decision taken by the mess council of the institute to reserve special vegetarian-only tables in the mess serving three hostel blocks to segregate vegetarian students from their non-vegetarian counterparts. Not surprisingly there was a huge commotion among the student community at this unprecedented decision implemented in late September this year although there was talk about this for some time in IIT Mumbai. What has compounded matters is the provocative move by a few students to take their non-vegetarian food and eat it at the tables reserved for vegetarians openly defying the authorities.
As a matter of fact, one of the students had written to the Dean of Student Affairs declaring that he did not accept the decision to impose separate vegetarian tables in the hostel mess and would continue to eat non-vegetarian food there to protest. Despite a stern warning by the authorities forbidding him to do so he and two other students went ahead with their protest. The incensed Institute management has hit back with a drastic ten thousand rupees fine on the student and is in the process of identifying the two other protesters. This has led to further furore among the protesting students.
The hostel authorities after a lengthy silence on the turmoil over vegetarian students versus non-vegetarian ones has finally in its first official communication declared, “Indiscipline in any form leading to disruption of harmony in the hostels will not be tolerated,” justifying the ban. They have argued that only a few tables in the hostel mess have been reserved for vegetarians but accused some of the students of encroaching on the segregated space and “deliberately spilling non-veg food to cause discomfort to fellow students”. “Such provocative and insensitive actions are not acceptable,” the authorities warned.
Meanwhile, the Ambedkar Periyar Phule Study Circle (APPSC), an informal student collective that wields some influence on the campus is spearheading the students’ protests against the segregation of vegetarian and non-vegetarian eating spaces. Since APPSC espouses radical Dalit politics the student agitation is rapidly taking a casteist turn further vitiating the academic atmosphere of one of the most elite educational institutes in the country.
“The problem is that this whole attitude that non-vegetarians and vegetarians need to be segregated comes from the idea that non-vegetarian food is contaminated,” an APPSC representative in IIT Mumbai told the media. “We understand it is totally normal to feel uncomfortable, and any student who feels that way can ask their fellow students to move to another table, and I am sure everyone has the basic civic sense to understand that. But turning it into segregation is very problematic. We believe it is a casteist practice,” he added.
This is not the first time that IIT Mumbai students have faced problems over what and how they eat in the hostel mess. As many as five years ago, non-vegetarian students of one hostel block received an official email from the hostel mess manager asking them not to use the main plates but special trays for non-vegetarian food that was covered by the local media and swiftly hushed up by the institute management. It is also true that the current hullabaloo over reserved vegetarian tables has been simmering for several months. Last July there was consternation within the student community at posters suddenly appearing in parts of the hostel mess that said in large letters,” “Vegetarians only are allowed to sit here” but there was no official backing and they were torn down. Now with tables being officially reserved for only vegetarians, the entire issue has erupted into a full-blown controversy.
The entire concept of vegetarian students being segregated by the IIT Mumbai authorities from non-vegetarian eating spaces is quite baffling considering that many of the former are likely to sooner or later travel abroad to entirely non-vegetarian countries for further education or jobs. Starting with the flights they take and the hostels they are likely to occupy it is most unlikely that vegetarians can isolate themselves from non-vegetarians while eating however distasteful their food may seem. It is also strange why the authorities in the institute could not avoid the divisions over food in the student community through a larger consultation among them.
There is little doubt that the farce over vegetarian and non-vegetarian food being enacted in IIT Mumbai is inextricably linked to the new socio-political agenda being imposed over the past decade in the country that imbues some kind of purity to vegetarian food over non-vegetarian fare. This is quite ludicrous in India where a vast majority of people are actually non-vegetarian and are as indigenous as vegetarians.
The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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