You cannot be Secular in India with these Shenanigans

Pharmaceutical company Himalaya found itself at the centre of a social media storm with the #BoycottHimalayaProducts hashtag trending on the microblogging app Twitter. This came after a social media post went viral with the ‘Halal policy’ of Himalaya.

As per the company’s policy, their products comply with Islamic law/Shariah and are produced using only halal products.

After the boycott campaign on social media, Himalaya issued a statement trying to clarify its position. The company stated, “In certain countries, halal certification is mandatory. Hence the halal certification is obtained as per the respective regulations for such countries only.”

While Himalaya is forced to get this halal certification to run their business in several countries, just like many other Indian companies that manufacture FMCG products, and is not limited to the meat industry, this imposition of halal products on non-Muslims has to be resisted in the larger interest of the Indian society due to the various problems it ends up creating. Here are the main issues.

Halal is discriminatory

For a meat product to be halal, the animal must be slaughtered only by a Muslim. In order to achieve economies of scale, the meat industry ends up operating large-scale abattoirs to produce all their meat. They end up using only Muslims at these abattoirs as it has simply become cheaper to produce all their meat together, instead of running separate abattoirs for halal and non-halal meat. In such a scenario, many Hindu communities, especially some Dalits, who were traditionally butchers, miss out on employment opportunities in the sector. Considering the meat industry is worth several Billion dollars, this is a huge sector where only people from one religion are finding jobs because of halal policies.