SCIENCE sciencemag.org 15 FEBRUARY 2019 • VOL 363 ISSUE 6428 679PHOTO: ANINDITO MUKHERJEE/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
T
he most widely discussed talk at the In-
dian Science Congress, a government-
funded annual jamboree held in Ja-
landhar in January, wasn’t about space
exploration or information technology,
areas in which India has made rapid
progress. Instead, the talk celebrated a story
in the Hindu epic Mahabharata about a
woman who gave birth to 100 children, cit-
ing it as evidence that India’s ancient Hindu
civilization had developed advanced repro-
ductive 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.
His talk was widely met with ridicule. 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 pseudosci-
ence rooted in Hindu nationalism have been
on the rise since Prime Minister Narendra
Modi came to power in 2014. They’re not just
an embarrassment, some researchers say, but
a threat to science and education that stifles
critical thinking and could hamper India’s
development. “Modi has initiated what may
be called ‘Project Assault on Scientific Ratio-
nality,’” says Gauhar Raza, former chief scien-
tist at the Council of Scientific and IndustrialResearch (CSIR) here, a conglomerate of
almost 40 national labs. “A religio-mythical
culture is being propagated in the country’s
scientific institutions aggressively.”
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 re-
search to stimulate India’s development, but
it also promotes “Swadeshi” (indigenous) sci-
ence and tries to connect modern science to
traditional knowledge and Hindu spirituality.
VIBHA receives generous government
funding and is active in 23 of India’s
29 states, organizing huge science fairs and
other events; it has 20,000 so-called “team
members” to spread its ideas and 100,
volunteers—including many in the highest
echelons of Indian science.
VIBHA’s advisory board includes Vijay Ku-
mar Saraswat, former head of Indian defense
research and now chancellor of Jawaharlal
Nehru University here. The former chairs
of India’s Space Commission and its Atomic
Energy Commission are VIBHA “patrons.”
Structural biologist Shekhar Mande, director-
general of CSIR, is VIBHA’s vice president.
Saraswat—who says he firmly believes in
the power of gemstones to influence well-
being and destiny—is proud of the achieve-
ments of ancient Hindu science: “We should
rediscover Indian systems which existed
thousands of years back,” he says. Mandeshares that pride. “We are a race which is
not inferior to any other race in the world,”
he says. “Great things have happened in this
part of the world.” Mande insists that VIBHA
is not antiscientific, however: “We want to
tell people you have to be rational in your life
and not believe in irrational myths.” He does
not see a rise of pseudoscience in the past
4 years—“We have always had that”—and
says part of the problem is that the press is
now paying more attention to the occasional
bizarre claim. “If journalists don’t report it,
actually that would be perfect,” he says.
But others say there is little doubt that
pseudoscience is on the rise—even at the
highest levels of government. Modi, who
was an RSS pracharak, or propagandist,
for 12 years, claimed in 2014 that the trans-
plantation of the elephant head of the god
Ganesha to a human—a tale told in an-
cient epics—was a great achievement of In-
dian surgery millennia ago, and has made
claims about stem cells similar to Rao’s.
At last year’s Indian Science Congress, sci-
ence 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=mc^2. “It’s
one thing for a crackpot to say something
like that, but it’s a very bad example for
people in authority to do so. It is deplor-
able,” Venki Ramakrishnan, the Indian-
born president of the Royal Society in Lon-
don and a 2009 Nobel laureate in chemis-
try, tells Science. (Vardhan has declined to
explain his statement so far and did not re-By Sanjay Kumar, in New DelhiSCIENCE AND RELIGIONClaims of great technological achievements in ancient times trigger ridicule and concern
In India, Hindu pride boosts pseudoscience
The Indian government in 2017 decided to fund research to validate claims that panchagavya, a mixture that includes cow urine and dung, has therapeutic value.Published by AAASon February 14, 2019^http://science.sciencemag.org/Downloaded from