Dear readers,Politics has a remarkable ability to recruit the most ordinary objects into ideological battles. It was the humble egg’s turn this week in West Bengal.When a mob hurled eggs, mud, and stones at Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra outside a party office in Nadia district on July 1, West Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya dismissed the episode as an internal Trinamool Congress squabble, though he did concede that “this egg-throwing must stop”. I am not sure whether he was more disapproving of the stones or the eggs. I was tempted to ask, who really has egg on their face in this spat? Eggs, after all, do not come at throwaway prices.About a week earlier, another controversy had broken out over eggs in West Bengal. Schools in the Kolkata Municipal Corporation area stopped receiving eggs in their midday meals after the State government entrusted the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) with preparing the food, and the organisation’s kitchens replaced eggs with vegetarian protein items such as paneer.Since eggs and fish are staples in West Bengal, the decision quickly acquired a political flavour. Trinamool Congress leader Derek O’Brien condemned the BJP for hurling eggs at political rivals while denying schoolchildren the nutrient by dropping it from the midday meal, calling this “imposing vegetarianism” that Bengal would reject.The West Bengal government is now weighing an arrangement similar to Odisha’s: allocating separate funds so that schools that want eggs can procure them themselves, in addition to the vegetarian meals ISKCON supplies. In neighbouring Odisha, also governed by the BJP, Akshaya Patra, ISKCON’s meal partner in the State, supplies the vegetarian food, but the government has for years separately arranged two eggs a week for students, funding this outside the Akshaya Patra contract.This is hardly the first time in recent history eggs (or food more broadly) have become political.Last year, when Maharashtra’s National Democratic Alliance government withdrew funding for eggs from the midday meal menu, Shiv Sena (UBT) MLA Aaditya Thackeray criticised the decision. In Karnataka, in 2021, the BJP government introduced eggs for students in classes I to VIII in seven backward districts, only to face protests from some religious leaders. It eventually promised to look for alternative sources of protein.In my home State of Bihar, mutton and chicken once reflected a religious divide. There was a time when many Hindu households in villages avoided chicken. It was widely seen as a Muslim food, perhaps because Muslim families were more likely to rear poultry. Mutton, meanwhile, was divided between halal and jhatka. Fish escaped these distinctions and, in its own way, united everyone.Politics, of course, is another matter.During the 2024 Lok Sabha election campaign, Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav, reaching out to fishing communities through his alliance with Mukesh Sahani’s Vikassheel Insaan Party, posted a video of himself eating fish inside a campaign helicopter. The BJP criticised him for eating fish during Navratra; Yadav shot back that the video pre-dated the festival by a day. Sahani responded in kind, with his long-running slogan: “Maach-bhaat khayenge, Mahagathbandhan ko jeetayenge” (we will eat fish and rice, and make the alliance win).Scientifically speaking, if you ask which came first, the egg or the chicken, the egg wins. The controversy came much later. The poor egg could hardly have imagined that one day it would become a political weapon, especially in a State where it is so enthusiastically relished.Mahatma Gandhi’s brief experiment with eggs is worth looking at here. In The Story of My Experiments with Truth, he writes: “This last experiment is worth noting. It lasted not even a fortnight… I was taken in by this plea and took eggs in spite of my vow. But the lapse was momentary.”Gandhi then discusses three competing definitions of meat that he came across in England before concluding that his mother’s understanding of vegetarianism was the one that bound him. Since his vow to her excluded eggs, he gave them up. For Gandhi, this was a matter of personal choice and fidelity to a promise. There was no question of imposing that choice on others.I had my own encounter with these questions years ago. I became associated with the Ramakrishna Mission almost two decades ago when I dabbled in a bit of spirituality. During a visit to Kolkata, I was surprised to find cooked fish being offered as prasad at Mayer Bari in Baghbazar, where Sarada Devi, the spiritual consort of Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, had lived.In the Hindi heartland, non-vegetarian food is usually absent from puja and prasad in Hindu households. Yet animal sacrifice has long been part of many Shakta traditions and certain Tantric practices. Religious customs have never been as uniform as politics sometimes makes them appear.That reminds me of the Hindu cosmological idea of the Brahmanda, the cosmic egg said to contain the 14 realms of existence. There is even a Brahmanda Purana. Leaving theology aside, however, non-vegetarian food has steadily gained wider acceptance, largely because of its nutritional value.The 2001 film Jodi No. 1, starring Sanjay Dutt and Govinda, gave us the catchy song “Aao Sikhaun Tumhe Ande Ka Funda” (Come, let me teach you the secret of the egg). Many of us also grew up on the National Egg Coordination Committee’s jingle, aired for years on Doordarshan: “Sunday ho ya Monday, roz khao ande” (Whether it’s Sunday or Monday, eat eggs every day).I see neither those kinds of movie songs now, nor any such jingles on television. But Sunday is still my egg day. I happily settle down with egg curry, though I am equally fond of dim bhaja (fried egg), dim bhuna, dim’er devil, dim pao roti, and dim paratha. Dim, incidentally, is simply Bengali for egg.The choice is yours. Eat the egg or throw it. I know which side I am on.What do you make of these edgy, or should I say eggy, issues? Do write back, as always.Anand MishraPolitical Editor,FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS