It's a bit like that time you were sitting in front of the TV and your favourite song suddenly came on, over the top of an advert for VW cars or Cathedral City cheese. I experienced the same conflicted feelings when I heard that McDonald's is to open a vegetarian restaurant.

As a lifelong vegetarian, I often proudly espouse the fact that I have never eaten in McDonald's. It's something that sets me apart from virtually every other person I have ever met. Most people return the news with a look of pity rather than respect, sure, but for me it's a badge of honour that I wear proudly. For me, McDonald's is the very embodiment of all that is wrong with eating meat - its mindless, quick-fix, stomach-filling brashness seemingly sticking two golden arches up at conscious eaters everywhere.

So what is it doing going veggie? Well, for a start, the new restaurant in question will be in India, where around 40% of the population is vegetarian, so this is not a sudden change of heart, this is simply economics. In July, McDonald's reported falling profits in India, so surprise, surprise, here comes a headline-grabbing idea for boosting sales.

Also, McDonald's hasn't survived this long without showing itself able to adapt to changing markets. In France, for example, you can order wine in McDonald's and get your burger topped with a stronger, more French, cheese. In Italy you can order pasta instead of fries. And in India the menu is already 50% vegetarian - a significantly larger percentage than in any other country.

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

That attitude also shows how the move could backfire. The Hindu nationalist group Swadeshi Jagran Manch, a branch of the influential Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, told the Daily Telegraph it would oppose McDonald's plans. "It's an attempt not only to make money but also to deliberately humiliate Hindus," said its national co-convener S Gurumurthy. "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."

The response of non-religious vegetarians to the first meat-free McDonald's is likely to be less extreme, and will largely depend on their reasons for being vegetarian in the first place. For those abstaining from meat on health grounds, they might venture in to give it a try - though if McDonald's ill-fated attempts to make salad is anything to go by, they may not find the menu particularly healthy.

But it's those who are vegetarian for ethical reasons who will feel the most conflicted. Should they embrace this step in the right direction and celebrate the day the world's biggest burger chain went veggie - if only in one isolated outlet? Or should they continue, like the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, to shun a corporation responsible for the slaughter of thousands of animals every day as well as many other well-documented corporate sins?

In the end, it's for each person's conscience (or tastebuds) to decide. For me, although I admit that the McAloo Tikki burger with its spiced potato-based filling sounds tempting, I wouldn't want to compromise my holier-than-thou posturing by breaking my lifelong ban on McDonald's. Although in reality I won't have to confront the issue - with only 6% of the British population currently vegetarian, don't expect to see a meat-free McDonald's here any time soon.