View: Ancient nukes to Corona idol, lack of scientific temper on show

“Corona is not a virus, but an avatar for protection of poor creatures,” says Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha national president Swami Chakrapani. He claims it’s a warning for the Chinese to become vegetarian and not kill animals. He also knows the way to end Corona-avatar’s tandava dance. Chinese president Xi Jinping should create an “idol of Corona and seek forgiveness”. Perhaps Chinese restaurants in India could also keep a Corona-thakur alongside the Laughing Buddha and the good luck cat with its upraised paw. Apparently, business has hit a slump because our Corona-fears extend irrationally even to Manchurian gobi and American chop suey.
One self-styled mediasavvy swami’s outlandish pronouncements would be laughable. But there’s a larger cavalier disregard for science, logic and rationality that extends well beyond the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha.

Whether it’s Tripura chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb claiming Sanjay used internet and satellite communication to relay Kurukshetra commentary to the blind Dhritarashtra or former Mumbai police commissioner Satyapal Singh wanting IIT students to study the Pushpak Vimaan from the Ramayana, Swami Chakrapani has plenty of company. Even the Prime Minister saw evidence of ancient Indian knowledge of plastic surgery in Ganesha’s elephant head. Technically it should have been head transplant surgery rather than plastic surgery but why lose our heads over technical details?

This is not something unique to Indian politicians and seers. When Hurricane Sandy hit America in 2012, British preacher John McTernan blamed Barack Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage for unleashing the wrath of God. Jerry Falwell, founder of a megachurch, said 9/11 was caused by pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays and lesbians, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), basically all “who have tried to secularise America”.

One fundamental difference, however, is while the Christian evangelicals want to strike the fear of God in their followers, for Indians this is a yearning for a ‘golden age’ of cultural supremacy when we had flying chariots, nuclear tests and free internet. However, in trying to give our myths a solid basis, in reality, we end up forgetting something more powerful: the fact that our ancients were not mere diarists documenting what they saw around them but were possessed of the power of imagination to dream up worlds that did not exist in reality.

“In today’s world imagination is a bad word,” says mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik in an earlier interview. “Everything has to be real whatever that means. And real is that which is measurable.” Thus it’s a priority to search for the vanished river Saraswati or the battlefields of the Mahabharata just as many Christians are hellbent on finding Noah’s Ark instead of imbibing the lessons those stories were meant to impart or celebrating the actual scientific achievements of an Aryabhatta or a Susruta. “There is a lot of low self-esteem in people who want to prove that their sacred books are not imagined,” says Pattanaik.

In 2017, a national steering panel was set up to study “scientific validation and research on Panchgavya”. Now the science and technology ministry has put out a call for proposals to locate medically and nutritionally useful ingredients in the dung, milk and urine of “pure indigenous cows”. This Sutra-Pic (Scientific Utilization Through Research Augmentation - Prime Products from Indigenous Cows) suggests among other things that there is surely a secret department in the government entirely devoted to making up nifty sanskari acronyms unlike the UPA years when everything could be willy-nilly named after a Nehru/Gandhi.

At one level, proper scientific peer-reviewed research into anything, whether it’s gaumutra or panchgavya, should be welcome instead of blindly trusting folklore. We can all benefit if indeed gaumutra can be scientifically proven to kill cancer cells. But Soumitro Banerjee, the secretary of Breakthrough, an organisation that promotes science and rational thinking, says real research needs to start with a null hypothesis. It cannot begin with the premise that gaumutra is a miracle drug. Ordinary cows can be researched. Holy cows can only be worshipped.

Swami Chakrapani might have a valid point about the planetary benefits of vegetarianism. But it gets lost in idle talk about a Corona idol. The issue, says Banerjee, is that in India “science is seen as a collection of subjects — physics, chemistry, mathematics. But actually, science is a way of thinking that tells us not to believe anything without proof.”

But that kind of scientific temper can prove to be a slippery slope. Goodness knows, then people might want proof for all kinds of claims — from the benefits of demonetisation to consumer spending reports to the arrival of Achhe Din itself.