“Einstein and Newton misled the world with their theories”. “Ancient India had perfected stem cell technology and had developed guided missiles”. “The Kauravas were test tube babies”.
These sentences haven’t been lifted out of a novel or a fantasy movie. They were stated by the Vice Chancellor of Andhra University, G Nageshwara Rao and Dr.Kannan Krishnan, a research scientist at the Indian Science Congress in Jalandhar.
The scientific community in India and abroad naturally reacted with shock, for the basic reason that stem cell technology, invitro fertilization and plastic surgery are recent advances and have emerged after years of research and experimentation. It’s very simple. For any technology to be called scientific, it must possess the capacity to be reproduced by anyone anywhere. Did that happen? The answer is no. It is very worrying that Indian academics are making claims by misreading religious texts, and not on the basis of hard facts and evidence.
In fact it was Prime Minister Modi who set the trend of outlandish claims back at the Indian Science Congress in 2014. He said that since Lord Ganesha had the head of an elephant and the body of a human, ancient India was well-versed in plastic surgery. Another minister claimed that since the Ramayana spoke of Ravana’s Pushpak Viman, India of those times had planes, complete with functional airports. This is a familiar strategy by Hindu nationalists of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to invent the greatness of India’s past. They smack of religious nationalism and an attempt to whip up a sense of Hindu religious pride, to undermine the truth for their narrow political ends, not quite unlike the Nazis did in Germany in the early 1920s.
But why are scientists and academics at the Indian Science Congress giving into this false rhetoric? It is clearly to please their political masters and land plum postings. I see similarities with what the Telugu poet C.Narayana Reddy did by introducing astrology in AP textbooks to get into the good books of the then AP Chief Minister NT Rama Rao, himself an astrology enthusiast. What resulted was an entire generation of students fed on pseudoscience.
There is no reason for Indians to resort to fake, unsubstantiated claims to have pride in their history. India has a very strong place in global scientific history, as the birthplace for key mathematical ideas, metallurgical technologies and home to the sophisticated Indus Valley Civilisation, which had weights and measures. Indeed, our country has produced geniuses like Ramanajun and Bose. What the ISC is doing is to make our country a laughing stock in the eyes of the world.
India’s is the only constitution in the world that urges its people to develop a scientific temper. Sadly, the ISC is doing little to achieve this. At the Jalandhar meet, the students should have been allowed to mingle freely with scientists and exchange ideas. Many students could very well have been inspired to take up science as a profession.
Silly stories per se are not of concern. What is worrying is when important people say dumb things, especially those manning major universities. Instead of instilling a spirit of enquiry in students, our academics are doing just the opposite. And it is sad that urban, educated, working professionals fall for such cock and bull stories. A major catalyst for this is Whats App. Even those who cannot separate chalk from cheese believe they are experts on the basis of Whats App forwards.
Amid the uproar, the Indian Science Congress has clarified that it does not subscribe to the worldview of a few scientists who made the mundane claims. This hopefully means that the prestigious science event is on its way to regaining its lost glory. The time has come to throw pseudoscience out of the window. I am tempted to quote from the motto of the Royal Society which reads “Nullius in verba” , latin for “Take Nobody’s word for it”. The ISC is in urgent need to imbibe this slogan.
Kanishka Uncensored 