Under
way in Delhi just now at the prestigious IIT is the first India
International Science Festival which has the participation of all its
top scientific organisations. It concedes that although India has “a
huge number of technically qualified professionals, (the) scientific
temper is not evident.” But it is doubtful how far the government is
willing to go to bring about this radical shift in thinking. As a party
that espouses Hindutva it might be hard put to allow the freedom of
thought and debate that Nehru considered essential for scientific
approach: “The adventurous and yet critical temper of science, the
search for truth and new knowledge, the refusal to accept anything
without testing and trial, the capacity to change previous conclusions
in the face of new evidence, the reliance on observed fact and not on
preconceived theory — all this is necessary, not merely for the
application of science but for life itself.”
That’s
what Nehru wrote in his Discovery of India in 1946. The BJP, on the
other hand, is crippled by the fundamentalist philosophy of its parent
organisation, the RSS, which has a fixed Hindu supremacist view on
history, science and culture. Even if Modi, a lifelong RSS man,
subscribes to the view that India needs more science in its
developmental push, it is not likely to come at the cost of religion.
Opposing views and any kind debate is no longer an option in the
Republic of Unreason where rationalists are killed by those affiliated
to RSS organisations.
For
the BJP-RSS combine, it’s a kind of schizophrenia in which the past,
largely phantasmagorical, is never far from the present. Take the
science festival at IIT. The nodal agency in organising it is Vijnana
Bharati, an RSS affiliate, which spearheads the “movement for swadeshi
sciences.” Point to note: M.S. Golwalkar or Guruji, the most revered of
RSS supremos, who defined its theocratic ideology, maintained the North
Pole was in India at one time! According to him, the “North Pole is not
stationary and quite long ago it was in that part of the world, which,
we find, is called Bihar and Orissa at the present... it moved Northeast
and then by a sometimes westerly, sometimes northward movement, it came
to its present position”.
The
board of Vijanana Bharati, also known as Vibha, is a good example of
how the RSS has infiltrated key institutions. Nuclear scientists and
space scientists are its patrons, while Vijay Bhatkar, chairman of
IIT-Delhi, is its president. Vibha is in regular contact with
governments and is not embarrassed to state that its inputs to
government are based on scientific evidence in the Vedas. The
humbling of IIT-Delhi is stunning. Of late it has been collaborating
with RSS-linked outfits. There has been no discussion on such changes in
the institutional framework of India’s cultural, academic and
scientific institutions.
It
is true that many such appointments are in order when governments
change and political camp followers are rewarded for their services to
party. But rarely has any government, not even past BJP regimes, made
appointments on purely ideological grounds, throwing the yardstick of
competence to the winds. For the party, capturing the cultural and
educational sector is of paramount importance in order to propagate its
Hindutva ideology. When the BJP first came to power in its earlier
avatar as the Janata Party in 1977, it was not an accident that L.K.
Advani chose the information and broadcasting ministry. But politically
and culturally, it has been bereft of cultural and intellectual capital.
Apologists
for Hindutva say it is because the right has been preoccupied with
political activism and has had little time to create an alternative
intellectual tradition. This failure, they argue rather perversely, is
because the liberal atmosphere did not allow the right to thrive and
marginalised what they term the “traditional intellectuals”. For
instance, journalist Swapan Dasgupta argues that the academic
environment in Indian universities since the late 1960s “has been
unrelentingly hostile to anything inimical to the liberal and Marxist
paradigm”. Because of this traditional disciplines were neglected and
traditional knowledge systems were destroyed “under the spurious guise
of implanting a scientific temper”.
If
it were willing to debate it would be instructive to know how the BJP
interprets the scientific temper. Amartya Sen’s Argumentative Indian
makes the point that the scientific temper has been the leitmotif of
Indian thought over the millennia and is not a Western import. From the
earliest times, Indians are said to have questioned and debated
everything — even beliefs on how the world was created. This is
enshrined in the Rig Veda, one of the oldest religious texts said to
have composed between some 3,500 years ago. The
verses that make up the “Hymn of Creation” have been held up as the
earliest example of sceptical inquiry. Today’s believers in ancient
Indian culture are full of certainties that have no basis. Many would
not even know of this particular hymn and its radical doubts.
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