By Rakhi Bose
In a move that has stirred controversy, the Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh in November announced a complete ban on the production, storage, distribution, and sale of food products with halal certification. A day after the announcement, the Uttar Pradesh Food Safety and Drug Administration led raids across 75 districts including grocery shops, malls, markets and godowns. The UP government’s rationale behind the ban is in the interest of “public health” and meant to undo a “parallel system” of food certification “that created confusion about the quality of food items”. The ban does not extend to products specifically manufactured for export.
The ban came in the backdrop of an investigation of a case registered at a police station in Lucknow against three firms for allegedly providing “illegal halal certificates” to products. With the commencement of the ban, the case has now been handed over to the Special Task Force (STF) of the UP Police. The original FIR was filed by a resident and member of Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) who claimed that some persons were using the illegal halal certification of products to push their sales among “certain communities”.
“These companies are preparing these certificates targeting one specific community, and the criminal act of reducing the sale of products without these certificates is being done. I suspect that unsuitable benefits from these actions are being handed out to anti-social and anti-national elements,” the FIR states, as per reports.
Since Halal food is directly related to the eating habits of Muslims across the world and is part of the community’s religious beliefs, the move to ban halal-certified products according to critics is likely to add to the disenfranchisement of Muslims in UP. This is not the first time that food and minority rights have become intertwined in the state in recent years.
Food is a key part of communal and identity politics in Uttar Pradesh and since 2017, the state administration has taken several steps that target certain types of food.
This story was originally published in outlookindia.com. Read the full story here .