A Genuinely Divided Practice

Beyond the kutha prohibition, Sikh institutions do not agree on whether meat should be eaten at all, and the disagreement runs between bodies with real authority rather than between casual opinions. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which administers the Golden Temple and many other major gurdwaras, serves only vegetarian food in its langars, the free communal kitchens, on the reasoning that a meal shared across every caste and faith must contain nothing any guest could object to eating. The Akhand Kirtani Jatha and the Namdhari Sikhs go further, holding vegetarianism to be a religious requirement for their own members rather than only a practical courtesy in a shared kitchen.

Set against this, the Rehat Maryada itself makes no such demand: its text prohibits kutha meat and says nothing that bars meat as such, and lay practice in Punjab and the diaspora reflects that gap, with a substantial number of Sikhs eating jhatka meat as a matter of course. Scholars of Sikhism generally describe the movement as a whole as neither vegetarian nor carnivorous by doctrine, with the real variation running along institutional and regional lines rather than along a single settled rule, which is why the question is recorded here as genuinely open rather than resolved in either direction.