VHP chief says Bengal Durga Puja meat 'guideline' was one monk's remark

Vishva Hindu Parishad international president Alok Kumar said on Saturday that the organisation has issued no guideline on meat or fish at Durga Puja pandals in West Bengal. "Vishva Hindu Parishad has not issued any directions regarding the arrangements at Durga Puja pandals. We know that we don't have any right to issue such directions and we don't make such claims."

The row began on Friday. Swami Nirgunananda, a member of the VHP central advisory council, told reporters that organisers should keep non-vegetarian food away from the idol. He said Bengal's puja has never been strictly vegetarian and that he was not asking for a blanket ban. If meat is sold, he said, it should be in a marked area outside the pandal so scraps do not reach the shrine. He also said the VHP could "intervene" if committees ignored the sanctity of the idol.

Those sentences were reported as guidelines. JD(U) national general secretary Shyam Rajak called a curb on meat and fish near pandals a positive step and then asked how it would sit with traditional animal sacrifice. Congress leader Udit Raj asked what authority the VHP had to issue commands. Other parties split along the usual lines.

Kumar's Saturday clarification tried to put the genie back. He said the VHP meeting itself did not discuss vegetarian or non-vegetarian food. Nirgunananda, he said, answered a reporter later and spoke about cleanliness at stalls. "Swamiji expressed his own view during the press conference, so framing narratives on that is not right." There is, in this version, no guideline and no organisational opinion.

The politics does not need a letterhead. In Bengal, Durga Puja is public religion, street food and municipal permission at once. A suggestion that meat stalls move away from the idol lands on a state where the ruling Trinamool Congress treats puja committees as a political network and where the BJP and VHP treat the same committees as a cultural field. Sacrifice, fish and goat meat are not imported controversies here. They are ordinary festival facts.

Nirgunananda's own words left a hook. He denied a total ban and then spoke of intervention if sanctity was ignored. Committees heard both halves. Kumar's walk-back is useful for a national office that does not want to pick a fight with Bengal's puja economy two months before the festival peak. It does not erase the Friday clips.

No government order has followed. No committee has announced a change of menu on the strength of Saturday's statement. The live question is whether local VHP units treat Kumar's line as binding or treat Nirgunananda's remark as the actual instruction.

Until a written circular appears, the record is a monk's answer to a reporter, a president's denial, and a political argument that did not wait for either.