Abstract
When an earnest student asked Modi about the climate crisis, he first made some paternalistic comments about children being so clever these days. Then he added that the climate was not changing, we were changing.
This presumably philosophical or metaphysical response had little to do with science and more with Modi’s preference of uttering meaningless bons mots.
India is one of the biggest emitters of carbon and has a huge responsibility to protect the planet, and the girl’s question was hardly absurd - but Modi made light of it.
Scientists were aghast, but Modi’s base - the Hindu nationalist voters yearning for a clever strongman - lapped it up.
That remark was an early indicator of Modi’s perfunctory interest in science. He likes to wave the tricolour when India lands a spacecraft on the moon’s south pole, but he gives free rein to his officials, who appoint underqualified religious fundamentalists who make outlandish and outrageous claims at institutes of technology.
For example, first-year engineering students at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mandi will now have to study a required course in topics including reincarnation, near-death and out-of-body experiences, and theories of consciousness.
The rot begins at the top, and Modi is prone to making scientific claims that simply don’t stand up.
He has said he used a digicam and email in 1988 - when the first commercially viable digicam wasn’t invented till 1990, and the use of email (or data transfers) was highly restricted and certainly not available to the general public until the 1990s.
After he ordered airstrikes in Pakistan in early 2019 to retaliate against an attack in India, Modi claimed he told the air force that rain and cloud cover would help Indian aircraft avoid detection by Pakistani radars. That would be news to air traffic controllers around the world, who seamlessly enable landings and takeoffs during terrible weather.
He has puzzled over the mathematics behind (a+b)2 for more than five years and has even claimed that genetic science began in India - and that plastic surgery existed in prehistoric, mythical times. How else did the elephant-headed God Ganesha have his head transplanted?
Such hilarious assertions are a feature of Modi’s Hindu nationalism. Taking a cue from the sustained assault on rationality and science, officials have gone about rewriting educational curriculums with abandon, undermining the future of Indian students.
Last year, the science journal Nature reported that Indian school textbooks for 15 to 16-year-olds were removing lessons on the periodic table and evolution. The textbook authority said the topics were removed because they were covered elsewhere, or because they were “difficult”.
Modi’s ministers have also frequently criticised the evolution theory, refusing to accept that humanity descended from apes.
One minister falsely cited the late scientist Stephen Hawking, claiming he had called the vedas (ancient religious texts) superior to Einstein’s E = mc2. Modi’s ministers have lavished resources on spurious research - such as the National Institute of Hydrology being asked to investigate whether Mount Kailash, in the Himalayas, is the source of the Ganges, as Hindu mythology claims.
To improve farm yield, farmers are asked to practise “yogic farming”, where they meditate so that seeds can feel “positivity”.
And Shankar Lal, a leader of the right-wing group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, praised how the application of cow dung to his mobile phone protected him from harmful radiation. “Cow is our mother,” he told The Indian Express. “Its excreta and urine are nectar and have power to save humans from any disease. If cow dung can treat cancer, why can’t it save us from a phone’s microwaves?” Remind me not to borrow his phone even to make an emergency call.
To be sure, Indians love wallowing in nostalgia and seek solace from ancient achievements, since much of the life around them shows misery - potholed newly-built roads, new trains being derailed and leaking parliament and airport buildings.
The veneration of ancient wisdom has picked up since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power, and Vedic Mathematics is another topic Indians have written extensively about. While there is a lot to learn from ancient mathematics, especially in abstract aspects, there is also a lot of noise, including leaps of logic.
Even the prestigious Indian Science Congress is not immune from nonsense, as “chauvinistic claims” are getting made.
In 2019, the vice-chancellor of Andhra University, who is an organic chemist, asserted that Kauravas, the villainous cousins of virtuous Pandavas in the Sanskrit mythological epic Mahabharata, were test-tube babies, and that Ravana, the Lanka king whom Rama defeats in Ramayana, had aircraft.
A scientist at the Clinigene Medical Research Center Bangalore, India
Another scientist insisted that Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were misinformed, and that gravitational forces would be renamed “Narendra Modi waves”.
Other claims made at such ostensibly scientific gatherings included that Pythagoras’ theorem was invented in India, not Greece; that there were interplanetary planes during the Vedas; that cows can turn their food into gold; that a helmet from the time of the Mahabharata was found on Mars; and that autopsies can be conducted by leaving a dead body on water.
There have also been claims that the aeroplane wasn’t invented by the Wright brothers but by a homegrown talent, and that an Indian had tested a nuclear device in ancient times, as a minister told a flabbergasted parliament.
Unsurprisingly, the Cambridge-based Nobel laureate Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, who has headed the Royal Society, has called the Indian science congress “a circus”, and other Indian scientists are in despair.
There are shrewd business reasons for making the alternative reality respectable. Ramdev, a yoga instructor who fashions himself as a holy man and calls himself Baba Ramdev, owns a large ayurvedic medicine business called Patanjali.
He misses no opportunity in criticising modern medicine and sought an injunction against a critical book about him by journalist Priyanka Pathak-Narain. His multi-billion-dollar business has been frequently challenged for making bizarre claims - the Supreme Court recently pulled him up - but the Modi establishment likes him.
A year after Modi became prime minister, Ramdev was an honoured guest at the Indian Institute of Technology.
These incidents seem as if they are from a Monty Python sketch. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
The cynical purpose behind it is to convince a resurgent, assertive India that it had always been a superpower. Its Hindu faith, Vedic knowledge and ancient philosophy gave it unparallelled wisdom.
Things went south when Muslim invaders conquered India and then the British colonised the country and subjugated Indians. In the years after, India dithered and fumbled, achieving little. It was only when Modi came to power that India took its rightful place.
This fanciful narrative is absurd and false, but it works for two reasons. One, Indians old enough to remember the independence movement or the prime ministership of Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-64) are dwindling fast. And two, Indians born after 1992, the year the BJP’s foot-soldiers destroyed the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, outnumber those who were born before 1992. That mosque destruction fundamentally changed the ethos of India, as it began to transform - slowly at first, rapidly later - into a Hindu nation.
Attacking Nehru, the real builder of modern India, has been a priority. Not only because of his genuine popularity worldwide, easy familiarity with international norms and his erudition but also because he steadfastly opposed irrationality and obscurantism.
Promoting “scientific temper” was Nehru’s priority, and he ensured that one of the articles of the constitution required that the state did just that.
It was in his time, and that of his immediate successors, that India built centres of excellence such as the institutes of technology, space research, atomic energy research, engineering, pure sciences and applied sciences, institutes studying cellular and molecular biology, and laboratories for physical research. It also promoted nuclear science and invested in boosting agricultural production.
Those advances helped India beat droughts, the Green Revolution fed millions, Indian rockets began orbiting the earth, and the country’s satellites provided connectivity and improved weather forecasting.
In the 1980s US companies discovered the potential of operating from India while engineers slept in the USA, with Indian programmers working on software code. As the Indians went to sleep, their American counterparts took over, creating a seamless 24-hour cycle. Little wonder that writers such as Angela Saini rightly extolled the good that the “geek nation” could do.
But these developments came at a cost. India’s rigid caste system ensured that access to quality education was for upper castes, and upper castes resented the government’s affirmative action quotas extending opportunities to disadvantaged groups.
Nehru’s early focus on elite institutions of higher education also meant that basic, primary education did not receive sufficient investment. So India had the dubious honour of having a very large number of skilled scientific personnel and engineering talent as well as an extremely large number of people who were actually, or functionally, illiterate.
Downgrading modern science and cheering hoary traditions is a fine, feelgood activity, but India needs to question if it can afford such a luxury. Decrying proven science and established theories and allowing pseudoscience to prevail would create a generation of zombies who would know how to forward rumours on WhatsApp but lack the intellectual means to understand if those rumours had any truth.
That requires one to know reason and begin to doubt. These are the cornerstones of a scientific mind, and it flourishes in an environment that respects freedom of inquiry and expression.
But these ideas can destabilise an insecure government. And that explains why Modi and his ministers want Indians to follow scriptures and not peer-reviewed papers.