While fans of biryani are always seen battling it out over the supremacy of their own regional version, this fragrant rice-meat dish finds itself in another ‘war zone’ whenever it’s election season in India.
Whether it’s for fuelling up the party cadre or enthusing voters, and even for so-called divisive politics and dog whistling, biryani never fails to spice up politics — in a manner as diverse and quintessential as the royal dish itself.
Interestingly, while biryani seems to be more ubiquitous to Hyderabad, Delhi, Awadh or Kolkata, this one-pot meal is an unmissable part of elections even in Tamil Nadu.
In the capital Chennai, political parties place bulk orders for workers and voters and ensure that everyone gets a piece of the meat, as per reports.
It’s Rs 150 — as per the rate card that the district poll panels have set — for a packet of chicken biryani in Chennai.
Easy to assemble, pack and eat, biryani is a special treat that draws voters as well as politicians in more ways than one.
“Congress would starve the poor people but feed biryani to terrorists,” Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath said at a political rally earlier this month in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled Rajasthan.
Incidentally, the party is often seen resorting to ‘biryani politics’, especially during elections, to attack the Opposition and go after the minorities, owing to the dish’s apparent origination during Mughal times.
In the run-up to the 2020 Delhi Assembly elections, when protests against the Centre’s Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), seen as discriminatory against the Muslims, were in full swing, Adityanath accused the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) of “supplying biryani to those protesting in Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere in the city”. A Muslim-majority neighbourhood in east Delhi, Shaheen Bagh became a sign of resistance as thousands of women, many of whom had never actively participated in politics, sat in against CAA-NRC. The Election Commission had then sent a notice to the BJP leader over his statement.
“Pakistan terrorists are being sent to hell by our soldiers. Congress and Kejriwal used to feed them biryani, but we feed them bullets,” Adityanath had said in another election rally then. Not only that, Amit Malviya, another BJP member and the national convener of the party’s IT cell, shared pictures on social media, claiming, “Proof of biryani being distributed at Shaheen Bagh,” which culminated into massive trolling online as food being offered and eaten at protest sites is nothing extraordinary.
However, the commentary backfired as the sale of biryani spiked after the AAP registered a landslide victory in the Assembly elections. Many eateries also came up with promotional offers to cash in on the increased demand.
Juxtaposed to the north, the BJP engaged in a different kind of biryani politics down south, where a police complaint was filed against its leader ST Somashekar for violating the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) during the Assembly elections in Karnataka last year. He was caught on camera asking the public to eat biryani that was being distributed during his election campaign.
The dish found a special place not only in Karnataka, but also in Madhya Pradesh, during the 2023 Assembly polls, where Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) organised biryani fests to engage more people and increase the strength of the party in the state capital Bhopal. In a way, the AIMIM brought a slice of Hyderabad, the party’s home turf, to engage with the people there. “Our effort is to make more than 1 million members from AIMIM before the Assembly elections. People are coming to Owaisi with enthusiasm. We are also offering biryani feasts to engage people in Narela. Hyderabadi biryani is very famous after Owaisi in India,” AIMIM leader and contender from Narela seat Peerzada Tauqir Nizami had said ahead of the elections, as per reports.
While biryani has often been used during elections to influence voters, nowhere has it been as successful as in Tamil Nadu in 1991 where Mani Shankar Aiyar was fighting for the Congress. As his opponent from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, a party known for opposing Brahmanical domination, charged against Aiyar over his Brahmin identity, he publicly helped himself to a non-vegetarian biryani to break the ‘Tam-Brahm’ image, as per media reports. And the rest is history. The leader was elected to Parliament that year.
As parties fight it out over biryani, so do the masses, such as in Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor during the previous Lok Sabha elections, where clashes broke out during the election meeting of the Congress party over the distribution of biryani. The shouting and slapping eventually ended up in an FIR against several people.
While biryani remains popular throughout the year, remaining the most-ordered dish on both Zomato and Swiggy for eight years straight, it also assumes a special place in Indian politics.