McDonald's faces protests in land of the sacred cow, India

McDonald's, home of the Big Mac, is facing Hindu protests over plans to open restaurants in two of India's most revered religious centres and pilgrimage sites, despite promising that they will offer only vegetarian menus.

Katra in Jammu and Kashmir is home to Shri Mata Vaishno Devi, one of Hinduism's four holiest shrines, and an unlikely site for a restaurant chain that slaughters millions of cows every year for its burgers, quarter-pounders and Big Macs.

McDonald's is also planning a second vegetarian restaurant in Amritsar, home of the Golden Temple, the centre of the Sikh religion in Punjab.

Although Sikhs are not forbidden from eating meat, their temples serve only free vegetarian food in their langar kitchens to pilgrims and visitors.

The opening of vegetarian-only stores is the latest attempt by McDonald's to win over people who have a passionate love of their own distinct spicy cuisine.

Beef has not been on the menu since McDonalds opened its first Indian store in Delhi in 1996, and although it has kept its carnivore focus, serving chicken nuggets, sausage muffins and fish burgers, its local stores have become largely unrecognisable from their Western outlets.

Its Aloo McTikki burgers - spicy Indian potato cakes - now account for a quarter of its sales, with McSpicy Paneer (cheese) burgers catching up fast. How McDonald's "golden arches" will be welcomed by pilgrims returning from the Golden Temple or the arduous climb to worship at the golden shrine to Shri Mata Vaishno Devi - an act of purification for Hindus - remains to be seen.

The shrine is a steep ascent of 3,000 feet from the town of Katra, high in the Himalayan foothills and a 10-mile hike in difficult terrain. Eighteen thousand pilgrims a day make the climb to the cave in which the shrine is housed and many of them wait up to 20 hours for their darshan or viewing of the "Mother Goddess".

"We see a huge potential [for vegetarian outlets] as, by nature, Indians are religious," Vikram Bakshi, who manages McDonald's restaurants in east and north India, told the Economic Times.

But the Hindu nationalist group Swadeshi Jagran Manch, a branch of the influential Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), said it would oppose McDonald's plans and described them as an attempt to "humiliate Hindus".

"It's an attempt not only to make money but also to deliberately humiliate Hindus," its national co-convener S. Gurumurthy told The Daily Telegraph.

"It is an organisation associated with cow slaughter. If we make an announcement that they're slaughtering cows, people won't eat there. We are definitely going to fight it."