In India, Hindu pride boosts pseudoscience
Sanjay Kumar
Science 15 Feb 2019: Vol. 363, Issue 6428, pp. 679-680
Summary
In recent years, "experts" have said ancient Indians had airplanes, spacecraft, the internet, and nuclear weapons—long before Western science came on the scene. Such claims and other forms of pseudoscience rooted in Hindu nationalism have been on the rise since Prime Minister Narendra Modi rose to power in 2014. Some researchers say they're a threat to science and education that stifles critical thinking and could hamper India's development. They blame the rapid rise at least in part on Vijnana Bharati, the science wing of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, a massive conservative movement that aims to turn India into a Hindu nation.
(Sanjay Kumar is a journalist in New Delhi)
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6428/679.summaryExcerpts:
"The most widely discussed talk at the Indian Science Congress...celebrated a story in the Hindu epic Mahabharata about a woman who gave birth to 100 children, citing it as evidence that India's ancient Hindu civilization had developed advanced reproductive technologies. Just as surprising as the claim was the distinguished pedigree of the scientist who made it: chemist G. Nageshwar Rao, vice-chancellor of Andhra University in Visakhapatnam. 'Stem cell research was done in this country thousands of years ago,' Rao said."
"But Rao is hardly the only Indian scientist to make such claims. In recent years, 'experts' have said ancient Indians had spacecraft, the internet, and nuclear weapons—long before Western science came on the scene.
"Such claims and other forms of pseudoscience rooted in Hindu nationalism have been on the rise since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014."
"Some blame the rapid rise at least in part on Vijnana Bharati (VIBHA), the science wing of Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS), a massive conservative movement that aims to turn India into a Hindu nation and is the ideological parent of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party. VIBHA aims to educate the masses about science and technology and harness research to stimulate India's development, but it also promotes 'Swadeshi' (indigenous) science and tries to connect modern science to traditional knowledge and Hindu spirituality.
"VIBHA receives generous government funding..."
"VIBHA's advisory board includes Vijay Kumar Saraswat, former head of Indian defense research and now chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University here."
"Saraswat—who says he firmly believes in the power of gemstones to influence wellbeing and destiny—is proud of the achievements of ancient Hindu science: 'We should rediscover Indian systems which existed thousands of years back,' he says."
"Modi, who was an RSS pracharak, or propagandist, for 12 years, claimed in 2014 that the transplantation of the elephant head of the god Ganesha to a human—a tale told in ancient epics—was a great achievement of Indian surgery millennia ago, and has made claims about stem cells similar to Rao's. At last year's Indian Science Congress, science minister Harsh Vardhan, a medical doctor and RSS member, said, incorrectly, that physicist Stephen Hawking had stated that the Vedas include theories superior to Albert Einstein's equation E=mc2."
"In 2017, Vardhan decided to fund research at the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology here to validate claims that panchagavya, a concoction that includes cow urine and dung, is a remedy for a wide array of ailments—a notion many scientists dismiss. And in January 2018, higher education minister Satya Pal Singh dismissed Charles Darwin's evolution theory and threatened to remove it from school and college curricula. 'Nobody, including our ancestors, in written or oral [texts], has said that they ever saw an ape turning into a human being,' Singh said."
"In the past 5 years, four prominent fighters against superstition and pseudoscientific ideas and practices have been murdered..."
"Some Indian scientists may be susceptible to nonscientific beliefs because they view science as a 9-to-5 job, says Ashok Sahni, a renowned paleontologist and emeritus professor at Panjab University in Chandigarh. 'Their religious beliefs don't dovetail with science,' he says, and outside working hours those beliefs may hold sway."
