Jawad Iqbal
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The targeting of Darwin reveals much about the attitudes of the country’s ruling elite towards science. It is a world view summed up perfectly in 2018 by Satya Pal Singh, then India’s minister for human resource development, who rubbished Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection as ‘scientifically wrong’ and called for it to be removed from school and college curricula. No one ‘ever saw an ape turning into a man’, he said in remarks widely quoted. He may no longer be in post but what he wanted has come about anyway.
The war on rational thinking and scientific fact has been gathering pace under India’s leader Narendra Modi, in power since 2014. Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are keen on the endless glorification of ancient India, and in particular the idea that all knowledge already exists in Hindu scriptures.
This narrow and distorted interpretation of history is part and parcel of the faith-based communal identity and ideology of Hindutva promulgated by Modi and his acolytes. Ancient myths are treated as facts and they supersede the claims to truth of upstart ‘Western’ science.
Modi once proclaimed that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh was proof of ancient India’s knowledge of plastic surgery. In 2015, a paper was presented at the prestigious Indian Science Congress claiming that an Indian sage had given detailed guidelines on making aircraft 7,000 years ago. Some Hindu nationalists claim that ancient India had nuclear weapons.
Research institutes across the country, often reliant on government funding, are encouraged to move away from traditional science to pursue pseudoscientific topics such as the medical benefits of cow urine. One BJP MP, Pragya Singh Thakur, declared in 2019 that a mixture of cow’s urine and other cow products had ‘cured’ her cancer.
It is not just science that is in the sights of these powerful enemies of reason. Since Modi came to power nine years ago, school textbooks on history have been targeted, with chapters on India’s centuries of history under Muslim Mughal rule removed.
The obsession of India’s rulers with the past doesn’t sit well with their repeated claims of building a ‘new India’ that will take its rightful place as a dominant power on the international stage. It will damage India’s economy and in particular the growing tech sector which is worth almost £200 billion: where will companies find scientifically literate Indians to fill these jobs?
It is also a disastrous backward step for a country that once proudly proclaimed itself a secular democracy. ‘To develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform’, is the duty of every citizen, according to India’s constitution.
For most of its 75 years since gaining independence, India did indeed value modern science and learning – a claim that it can no longer make. That’s a real tragedy.
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