A file photo of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. PHOTO: AFP
As reported by The Times of India on January 7, two lectures at the Indian Science Congress made claims about achievements of ancient Indians creating a new controversy. Andhra University Vice-Chancellor G Nageswara Rao, a professor of inorganic chemistry, claimed that Kauravas from the Indian mythological epic Mahabharata were born using stem cell technology. These claims have highlighted a fundamental problem for the congress: in the past few years, what had once been a gathering of the country’s most reputed scientific minds has become a platform for numerous such statements based on mythology.
At the same session, K J Krishnan, a scientist at a centre in Tamil Nadu, claimed that the theories of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were wrong and would be disproved. He said gravitational waves would soon be renamed as ‘Narendra Modi waves’, while the gravitational lensing effect in physics would be renamed as ‘Harsh Vardhan effect’. He went on to claim that electricity and magnetism were the same phenomena.
The ‘Post Truth’ period has given way to absurdity and its patronage at the highest political level has compounded Indian polity, no wonder Modi was present on the ‘auspicious’ occasion to head the ‘Science Circus’ in this prestigious congress held at Jalandhar.
Justice Katju while writing in the Week Magazine criticised the idea of Vedic Science. He said, “The Union ministry of culture is setting up a ‘Vedic Heritage Portal’ under the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, Delhi to collect and communicate scientific knowledge in the Vedas.” But there is no scientific knowledge in the Vedas, so how can something which does not exist be collected and communicated? Who is the ministry of culture trying to fool?”
Some of the Indian scientific community members were skeptical about this circus. Such claims have led to noted scientists staying away from sessions of the congress in the past. In 2016, Indian-born Nobel laureate V Ramakrishnan, a biologist at Cambridge University, had objected to religious ideas being mixed with science. “I attended the congress once and very little science was discussed. I will never attend it again. The idea that Indians had aircraft 2,000 years ago sounds almost essentially impossible to me”.
Earlier, none less than PM Modi, while addressing a gathering of doctors and medical staff at a Mumbai hospital in 2014, had said that the story of the Hindu god Ganesha showed cosmetic surgery existed in ancient India. “We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery,” he had said. According to Hindu mythology, Lord Ganesha was created when Lord Shiva attached the head of a baby elephant to the body of a child.
This so-called Science Congress at Jalandhar drew wide criticism from the International press like the BBC and The Guardian quoting those Indian scientists who wanted to keep away from rhetorical claims on stem cells research and ‘Modi Waves’. The Guardian and BBC quoted anecdotes and wisdom pieces from the science circus like, “Hindu Lord Vishnu used guided missiles known as ‘Vishnu Chakra’ and chased moving targets”, added a professor of inorganic chemistry. Science minister Harsh Vardhan last year said ancient Greeks took credit from India for early mathematical principles and misquoted Stephen Hawking as praising the Vedas for discoveries greater than Einstein’s theory of relativity.
As quoted by the News Click, the All India Peoples Science Network, in their press statement, has demanded that the president, the scientific adviser to the PMO, the three Indian Science Academies and the Indian Science Congress Association step in to end this repeated misuse of the Indian Science Congress since 2014 to spread pseudoscience and irrationality.
Ramesh Chandra hit hard at the state of affairs in India while commenting on an article in The Times of India on the Science Congress by stating, “Indians have only two choices; either they have to accept corrupt family thugs or gangs or live with cow dung-minded idiots.”
An analysis of BJP trolls aka ‘Bhakts’ commenting in various articles published in the Indian and international press is alarming as these Bhakts were tenaciously defending the proceeding of the Indian Science Congress at Jalandhar. The logic (absurdity) of these comments suggests that the BJP has been able to sell the idea of ‘Saffronised’ science and history and no logical argument can contest or defeat it. Sane voices raised to object to this absurdity have been hushed by Cow Vigilantes and Gao Rakhshaks, who maraud the countryside as defenders of Hindutva; condemning or criticising ‘Saffron science’ is un-patriotic and punishable in Modi’s India.
Why it is Saffronisation of Indian history and science unstoppable, most probably it’s the fear factor which has even forced self-censorship by liberals, intellectuals, celebrities and scientists to express their sentiments in hushed tones. Despite this fear factor, sane and secular voices, like Justice Katju and Naseeruddin Shah, have regularly raised their voice against the hate train driven by RSS thugs. Naseeruddin Shah exclaimed, “There is complete impunity for those who take law into their own hands. In many areas we are witnessing that the death of a cow is more significant than that of a police officer.” He also expressed fears about the future of his children who were brought up in a secular environment in his home.
Justice Katju, in his recent article published by Daily Times, talked of a creepy feeling of implosion of India and stated, “The truth is that from this year India is going to enter into an era of what can be called the Great Turbulence, which in my estimate will last for 15-20 years, and in which crores of Indians will perish or suffer terribly.”
Some historians believe that if it wasn’t for the Mughals, India would still be a lost Empire in global politics and thus would never come up as an economic giant in the 17th and 18th centuries. The entire focus of the Aryan caste system was to brainwash people in believing that a particular group was of superior race, an aspect which was seen in the form of swastikas and fascism in Nazi Reich and Hirohito’s Japan where such ideologies were propagated and established.
To conclude the piece, here’s a quote from K VijayRaghavan, the Indian government’s principal scientific adviser, “The gorillas that really deserve to be in the #pseudoscience bin are huge, numerous and freely roaming the landscape”. Can India find a cage large enough to house these gorillas?
Published in The Express Tribune, January 24th, 2019.
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