At a BRICS summit, Prime Minister Modi's government served an all-vegetarian dinner to foreign dignitaries — a seemingly modest culinary decision that ignited a deeper argument about who speaks for India's identity on the world stage. The opposition read the meatless menu as an act of erasure, a narrowing of a vast and plural food culture into a single strand. The government saw it as a legitimate expression of traditions practiced by millions. What unfolded was less a dispute about dinner than a recurring human question: when a nation steps before the world, whose story does it choose to tell