By Sabah Gurmat
Muzaffarnagar/Sambhal: When restaurant manager Waseem Ahmed decided to launch his first restaurant to cater to travellers and truck drivers on National Highway 58 (NH-58), little did he anticipate the social churning that was to come.
Forty-three-year-old Waseem, along with his business partner, Pushpraj Singh, made a conscious choice to run two ‘pure vegetarian’ eateries, or dhabas, on the Delhi-Dehradun route in the outskirts of Muzaffarnagar in western Uttar Pradesh. But this year’s Kanwar Yatra (pilgrimage) resulted in their business taking a turn for the worse.
The Kanwar Yatra is held every year during the onset of monsoon or ‘saawan’ season, with lakhs of devotees of lord Shiva carrying holy water as offerings. Since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power with chief minister Yogi Adityanath leading the government in Uttar Pradesh, the pilgrimage has been marked by growing religious polarisation. This includes district administrations in the state ordering the closure of meat shops along the route undertaken by pilgrims.
Some of the earliest such diktats were issued in Ghaziabad in 2016, by the Samajwadi Party (SP) government, and later in Dadri – the site of the communal lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq – after the BJP was elected to power in 2017.
While Dadri’s far-right Hindu groups had been demanding a ban on the sale of meat during the yatra since 2016 itself, the shift in government from SP to the BJP reportedly saw the region’s police administration finally enforcing a closure on meat shops in July 2017.
Continuing this policy in 2023, the Adityanath administration ordered closure on the sale of meat starting July 4, with police officials citing the “maintenance of peace between communities” as reason for the same, even as several butchers, meat-sellers and restaurants claimed their livelihoods were impacted. In a first, as per locals, Muslim owners of even vegetarian restaurants and eateries across western UP now claim to be under threat since the yatra.
“The closure of meat shops has been happening for at least five or six years as far as I can recall. I understand it may hurt Hindu sentiments, but what have we done wrong when we only sell vegetarian items? The co-owner is a Thakur (Hindu), our staff is almost 90% Hindu. But they even told us to shut shop along with the non-vegetraian places this time. I’m convinced this is just because of my name,” said Mohammad Waseem, who runs the Sukhdev dhaba and ‘New Ganpati Tourist dhaba – Number One’ on Muzaffarnagar’s highway.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here