This makes no sense to me. This highly unlikely to be a political move. Science education is not political in India. Evolution, abortion, chemistry are not debated at all.
This is more likely for the reasons to be innocuous.
> In explaining its changes, NCERT states on its website that it considered whether content overlapped with similar content covered elsewhere, the difficulty of the content, and whether the content was irrelevant. It also aims to provide opportunities for experiential learning and creativity.
> NCERT announced the cuts last year, saying that they would ease pressures on students studying online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amitabh Joshi, an evolutionary biologist at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, India, says that science teachers and researchers expected that the content would be reinstated once students returned to classrooms. Instead, the NCERT shocked everyone by printing textbooks for the new academic year with a statement that the changes will remain for the next two academic years, in line with India’s revised education policy approved by government in July 2020.
Sounds more like students have continued lagging behind after coming back from Covid, than anything malicious. I have literally never heard of national politicians in India being anti-science.
I might be wrong, but I would genuinely like to see 1st source statements from the board indicating that these changes are religiously motivated.
I have no idea exactly how much this particular curriculum change is influenced by religion. But your assertion that science is depoliticized in India is very wrong.
This is just one of many such troubling incidents, including apparent indifference to the murder of pro-rationalism academics.
Anecdotally, if you have people from India in your life, this is inescapable. Constant barrage of forwards on WhatsApp of Hindu supremacy, which necessarily have to flip history upside down. The story goes that Hindus had nuclear energy 10,000 years ago, but filthy foreigners corrupted Mother India.
> By the 2021-2022 academic year, Darwin’s theory was quietly removed from the examination syllabus for the students of Class 9 and Class 10. By 2022-2023, the topic of evolution was completely purged from school textbooks, teachers and education experts told Al Jazeera.
> The story goes that Hindus had nuclear energy 10,000 years ago, but filthy foreigners corrupted Mother India.
I’ve never understood this kind of messaging. You see it in all sorts of supremacists.
But how is it a credit to you and your ancestors that they had the ability to create nuclear power or fly, etc and then they just lost it!
That’s a sign of deep shame. The particular group of people you’re claiming are superior are so incompetent they weren’t even able to keep knowledge they already had.
Seems like the group of people you think are so superior have been getting dumber with every generation and you therefore are the dumbest of your lineage.
It's also like bragging that you were a highly advanced civilization and got conquered/occupied by a bunch of dumb savages. There's a few more prominent countries that follow similar narratives and I agree with you that it sounds far more embarrassing than boasting. And if you're superior then why haven't you caught up or surpassed the others? I can understand if this is like <100 years but longer than that feels embarrassing and counter to the superiority narrative.
As to why it works, I completely understand. We just want reasons to feel superior. It is why in high school jocks define metrics as strength and why nerds define metrics as intelligence. It's why we have "well I have street smarts" and other things like that.
>>It's also like bragging that you were a highly advanced civilization and got conquered/occupied by a bunch of dumb savages.
They explain that part by using the idea of 'traitors'. They are often the minorities of that land(whom they currently hate, and serve as a nice punching bag in the whole process, and in the overall scheme of hate process).
The 'traitor' part is like a constant theme in these stories. Super advanced ancestors, but also very nice, accommodating to everyone. Some savages from the outside invade, traitors help them from inside. Savages win, they are colonised. Traitors benefit. The monuments, symbols and anything to do with the traitors is now demonised and the 'treason' is used as a casus belli for a genocide/ethnic cleansing.
Quite similar, in that respect, to the Vietnam War. The "We would have won if it weren't for the people back home who stopped us from fighting" stance, for instance.
The corollary story that usually shows up is that Westerners "stole" scientific discoveries from India and suppressed them while the country was under occupation. There's a fairly standard example of this at:
But how is knowledge "stolen"? I understand in the context of piracy, but like piracy you can't really remove it from the originator. Sure, you can take and destroy all books you can find, but it is also pretty easy to make new books (and hide them) or pass knowledge through word of mouth (or hidden in stories). Wouldn't a highly intelligent society be able to accomplish such a simple feat that's been demonstrated by hundreds of civilizations through historY?
I didn't say the narrative made sense! But I think the implication was that there was some sort of systematic campaign to erase Indian records of that knowledge after "stealing" it, i.e. by destroying artifacts and written records, preventing word-of-mouth transmission of history, etc. Of course this is all nonsense, but it's nonsense which plays well to an audience which is open to nationalist, anti-imperialist messages.
I agree that all of the example in the blog post and bbc article are nonsense. However, I think that you're slightly wrong in this statement:
> I think the implication was that there was some sort of systematic campaign to erase Indian records of that knowledge
The blog post is more specific than "Indian records". The blog post is talking about the Vedas in particular. I don't know much about the Vedas, but this looks a lot more like biblical literalism to me. The references to the Raj and to stolen knowledge are used to bolster the Vedas as a primary source of truth.
> Even by today’s standards, if properly applied, these Vedic Sutras can create most advanced technological instruments and mammoth machines ever known to mankind.
> Science expanded its views in the area of observation as well. Thomas Edison developed the light bulb and the motion picture based on Vedic principles. Sun rays emitting illusory rainbows, speed of light and its composition are all explained in Vedas. The idea that light defines or makes our universe visible can be found as explained by Shrila Prabhupada in his purport to SB 2.9.4 “In the darkness one cannot see the sun, nor himself, nor the world. But in the sunlight one can see the sun, himself and the world around him.”
FWIW, I think that it's pretty straightforward to suppress knowledge though. You can record knowledge into books, but it's not really known if no-one is reading the books or using that knowledge. You can suppress metal-working know-how by eliminating metal-working jobs. The Raj had a profound control over India which affected the available areas of work, which would affect what people wanted to learn. You don't have to explicitly ban a topic to make people not want to study that topic.
Humiliation is essential to any fascist project. You can see this in any of the statements from fascist and authoritarian leaders. They’ll emphasize how tricky and duplicitous the enemies are, how the good and honest people were defrauded, but now they’re exacting revenge.
Its crazy man. There is constant barrage of world's best prime minister, best food, best flag, bext xyz declared by NASA/UNO/AMERICA and stuff. Anything tou can think of, its best is in India as per that whatspap forwards & university. If you agree, good. If you object based on facts, you are anti national, anti Hindu. Really crazy.
Haha, it's funny but that's the story they go with. There's also great anger in India for "paid conversions" where Christian missionaries give people money and resources if they'll become Christian. Ultimately, it seems reasonable that you go with the god who serves you best.
Reminds me of the story of Job. I'm not sure how people read it any other way than Satan pulling a fast one over God. How is it not a story where Satan tricked God into torturing Job?
Strange how a former police officer gets a gov job with influence over higher education. He called himself a “man of science” but his entire career was police work with a bit of politics at the tail end.
He was “minister of state” [1] for the Ministry of Human Resource Development which apparently was renamed the Ministry of Education after he left.
[1] Google tells me that’s an assistant/junior role to the actual Minister.
Minister of State is a generic executive position that is created to reward medium level politicians.
Satyapal Singh specifically helped the BJP win over the Jat community in Western Uttar Pradesh which before 2014 voted for the RLD (a Jat primary party in western UP, Rajasthan, and Haryana).
By rewarding him, with a low level backbench minister position, he can provide patronage to the rest of his patronage network.
He also tried to save Amit Shah+Modi's political skin during the Ishrat Jahan encounter killing case while he was part of the IPS.
Indian politics is heavily based on micro-level community based calculations because of how close elections are in India (most elections are decided within 5,000 votes ie. one town). Due to this, caste, family, and regional patronage networks form, and this is common across all parties (INC, BJP, etc).
For example, Modi rose to power in Gujarat by helping organize a Dalits+Tribal+Urban coalition in the 1980s and 90s at the expense of a combined Muslim+Patel voting bloc. This same template Modi used is what the BJP has been using since 2014 (intersectionality of identity based on Hinduism ie. Hinduvta).
And the same thing happened in Satyapal Singh's area during the Muzaffarnagar/Shamli riots when the Dalit Hindu + Dalit Muslim voter bloc split due to communal violence, leading to Hindu Dalits leaving the BSP for the BJP, Hindu Jatts leaving the RLD for BJP, and Dalit Muslims leaving the BSP to support the Samajwadi Party because there was no other viable party left in Western Uttar Pradesh.
I am not a fan of the BJP, but you got to hand it to them - they are probably the only national party in India with a strong understanding of subaltern power struggles and micro-level demographic data. Anyone in the INC who knew this stuff defected to the BJP by 2019 anyhow, but might defect back to the INC assuming the right PM candidate is selected (Gehlot would be a strong competitor against Modi, RG would have a hard time)
India is not alone. We have a well-known rapper in France who recently explained how the Egyptian pyramides were something something electricity generators and that Egyptians had electricity thousand of years ago.
This was relayed on TikTok and other platforms to the point where some gov't official had to say that this is bullshit.
This is complicated. I mean, first you gotta ask what India even is. From a purely border perspective (this is the important context) it is no different than any other country[0] (play videos for other regions). Current borders only exist since 1950. The longest stable period of Indian borders (and largest) were actually under English occupation. Prior to this the largest empire was the Maurya Empire, which covered Pakistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh but did not reach the southern point of modern India. They didn't even hold this for 100 years. Mughal Empire might be the next best example, but was far later and similarly didn't hold for long.
But this is the history of every region/country. There aren't realistically countries that are thousands of years old, only centuries (and not as how we think of them). But this isn't politically popular. Similarly is that a small force can't occupy a region without significant levels of collusion with local players[1]. English occupation influenced Indian unification as it also unified adversaries and caused competing groups to align to a more important goal. We like to paint stories of ancient cultural heritage, but this is all very fuzzy and extremely messy. Many cultures can claim inventions as borders drastically shifted over the centuries. I think a lot of this just has to do with are limited context windows and that it is hard to codify these timeframes and the complexities of establishing borders (obviously along with political narratives and propaganda). But it also should say a lot about the modern world and why Long Peace is such a big thing (very recent thing btw).
[1] I need to be clear that this doesn't justify or excuse in any way occupation. It doesn't dismiss the brutalities and injustices. It is more about how while the dominant blame belongs to the ruling/occupying class, that we must be careful to not let this blame let local players be swept under the rug, as they play a critical role and local populations have more influence on these actors. It is about nuance and a warning, not an excuse.
* the civilization and peoples that made the subcontinent its home
* the borders and the political entity in control of those borders (past, present, future)
The British did not create the civilization or the religions they found when they landed here.
The didn't build the temples, or compose the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Itihasas, the Puranas, or the various dharma shastras.
And Indian people didn't emerge out of British vaginas.
The idea that India didn't exist before the British (a lot of people claim this) is nonsensical. The only claim one can make is that they became, for a time, Chakravartin.[1] They were not the first, and they won't be the last.
> They didn't even hold this for 100 years.
Powers (the State) and areas enclosed by the borders it claims and governs (the political boundaries; the country) are always ephemeral things. Be it 100 years or 1000 years, they will change.
For most people, this has only been relevant in so far as the impact it has on their daily lives. Does the State interfere in their religious, social, personal and economic affairs? To what extent? Does it protect them from insiders and outsiders who attempt to do the same? To what extent? These are the only questions that matter.
Couldn't the same be said for the dominant group before and after? Honestly asking, but looking through the history, that area has been in turmoil a long time, which is true of most places. And also does not excuse imperialism either of course.
Or the British suspiciously inventing nuclear weapons/power relatively quickly after the occupation of India. Or even when they began trading. Nor the Greeks. But maybe the British were just playing the long con. Well played British... well played. Waiting a hundred years, giving the technology to the Americans, and letting Germany bomb your cities and almost occupy your country. Very crafty.
The British had a deliberate policy of extracting raw materials and flooding the market with machine-manufactured goods. The British markets were not open to Indian manufacturers. So not only was India de-industrialized, but many rare skills and techniques were lost during this period. I can’t find a reference, but I remember reading an early British East India Conpany account of encountering silk of such fine quality that yards of it could be folded into a tiny box. Those workers would have been put out of business by the British, and their skills lost for generations. Might be a legend but I’m sure many things like that happened.
It’s just not things like rockets or nuclear weapons.
In the West, any attempt to debate science is declared to be anti-science, which eventually suffocates science. Conformity to the party line is the ticket to funding (from the political establishment) and acclaim. Are there anti-science people? Sure, but far fewer than the knee jerk reactionists say there are. And someone who goes around calling everyone anti-science without logical basis is antithetical to scientific debate and advancement.
Let us remember where a lot of "scientific" funding comes from, the politicians and Uncle Sam; which inherently tends to corrupt the "science" to become political.
There needs to be some added context to this. Many anti-science advocates mask as "just asking questions." This was the whole Koch strategy over climate change (they didn't invent it though) where they exaggerated uncertainties in data/conclusions. These always exist, they are called error bounds, but can be quite nuanced. It is easy to bastardize scientific language, which is different than laymen (and why it is possible, though noisy, to identify scientists on semi-anonymous forums like this one).
> Let us remember where a lot of "scientific" funding comes from, the politicians and Uncle Sam; which inherently tends to corrupt the "science" to become political.
Which this is a flag about your political beliefs and lack of experience. It just doesn't follow the practicality of the situation. Neither democrats nor republicans control government science. If you look at DOE secretaries you'll see their party affiliation matches the sitting president. In the labs, there are a lot of political diversity (including a need to ban news being played in the cafeterias because it led to fighting). It is far from monolithic and it's absurd to paint it with a wide brush. You also need to decouple the science (what's being published) from what becomes political narratives (news/directions from secretaries). Gov scientists frequently publish works contrary to the normal political narratives (even of the agency) and if they are prevented from publishing leaks happen pretty quickly.
Some science itself is innately connected to politics (others "aren't"[0]: e.g. cosmology or particle physics). The question is how science should be participating (leading, participating, or auxiliary). You invent new technologies that affect societies and governments... govern societies. You find information that affect citizens and of course this is going to affect policy (e.g. climate change). Of course there are going to be biases, but there is less than what you'd find in an industry. Government science is different, especially since the focus is far less profit motivated (the scientists also aren't making much and can make far more in industry if they are profit motivated). While not ideal, gov science should be a third party verification of information. As an example, looking at climate again, you look at the results of 3 (not independent) different groups: gov, industry, academia (influenced by both gov and industry). If gov + academia comes to a consensus, industry agrees with data but not conclusions, then there's reason to distrust the industry conclusions as there's profit incentives. Your comment is destructive because it has been the narrative that has led to industry capture and manipulation. We've seen it in leaded gasoline, cigarettes, climate change, and many others. No, gov and academia aren't perfect, but this shouldn't result in defaulting to industry opinion or allowing them to dominate narratives. This has to stop.
[0] quotes because money and funding is political, but this is different than conclusions like climate change. Most gov science is in the low politics camp btw.
> I have literally never heard of national politicians in India being anti-science.
Not anti-science per se but Indian politicians are quite famous for pseudo-scientific nonsensical statements like Mr Modi claiming that advanced surgery existed thousands of years ago when doctors sewed an Elephant's head to a God's body[1] and then claiming presence of test tube babies in ancient times[3]
On the other hand, Union Health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan claimed that Vedas had knowledge beyond Theory of Relativity[3]
BJP, the ruling party has tried to indoctrinate a bunch of nonsense like Wright brothers did not invent the airplane, it was infact ancient Indians[4].
India actually has a well-funded ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy) and its influence has massively grown over the past decade. It is as anti-science as you get.
> Not anti-science per se but Indian politicians are quite famous for pseudo-scientific nonsensical statements like Mr Modi claiming that advanced surgery existed thousands of years ago when doctors sewed an Elephant's head to a God's body
There is evidence for plastic surgery being known in Ancient India through works of Sushruta/Charaka. Leaving apart the sewing of an elephant’s head on a human body, which was probably added for religious/mythological effect I don’t quite see what’s nonsensical here?
This is a very strange comment for a Hindu nationalist to make. I thought it was well established that Shiva installed the elephant head on Ganesh's body after he rashly beheaded him before realizing he was his son. It seems very bizarre to imagine a god using a plastic surgeon to sew the head on.
Not how I read it. OP seems to completely dismiss the possibility that some surgical techniques may have been known in Ancient India because of what I’m sure is prejudice against one or more of religion/Hinduism/speaker(Modi in this case). Like I said the story about the elephant’s head is likely mythological/religious but that doesn’t take away from the other basic facts.
OP quotes saying that Indian politicians from the current party are being anti-science, but the first link where modi talks about religious texts is trying to link it to science.
If you read further in the link he talks about Aryabhata and space science and how we need to regain those.
This is anything but anti-science
Seems pretty funny to me, the reference added to say that this Indian politician is anti science is actually trying to encourage ppl to become good at science. May be he using religious based texts, but that speech in the article isn’t really anti science though.
Ah, you are not reading the situation right. The fascist elements have hijacked the term "science". Nowadays, it is science if you say that cowling protects against atomic radiation ([1]) or you say that ancient India had interplanetary travel ([2]) .. note that the latter was at an official track at the Indian Science Congress on science in ancient India. If the vedas said something, that is science. If the white man brought out a periodic table, either ban it, or say 'our ancient texts already knew about it'. That's the state of India right now.
You will never see any statements by the board. They are comprised of people who are either scared shitless of speaking out, or who are really religious fundamentalists at core.
Generally the goal of an authoritarian government is keeping the leader in power long enough to rob the country blind and then die peacefully. Where they have goals outside of that they do not tend to prioritize education — educated people often have more of the resources they need to challenge power.
Power is always in comparison to something. You are powerful compared to somebody. So as long as they have enough to exercise control over minorities of India and feel nice about it they are powerful enough.
The whole idea of western style power over the whole world is not something they imagine as power. Or at least proactively work towards.
Having seen Avenue 5, and also having just performed a four second web search, I feel mildly confident in saying this is interesting, because poo is indeed great radiation shielding.
1 is just a regional judge reaffirming existing cow conservation law with some woo woo in his decision, 2 is a non-scientist giving a lecture at a science institute which caused controversy among the actual scientists.
Neither of them really have anything to do with the science/government control other than India’s long standing obsession with cows.
Ayush is a govt portal for govt funded products based on ancient Indian pharmacology. Here is the 'research' on panchagavya (click to find out what it is, and weep)
https://ayushportal.nic.in/panchagavya.html
This is not an isolated person who's lost his marbles. It is a massive country, where a small but highly vocal and powerful minority has completely lost it, and they are the ones who vote.
--------
As for the second, it was not a lecture at a science institute. It was the 102nd Indian Science Congress, an event that is supposed to be prestigious. Indian Nobel winners, Field medalists, prominent space scientists were there amongst the august crowd. And there was an entire track imposed on that event by the govt.
I am not going to give a link to that paper; you need to do some homework. That is of course, if you care about what is happening. Hope you will not be like the others who say, 'but Modi is building roads and airports, so everything is getting better'. I weep for my country.
The United States routinely has states, especially in the South, trying to get rid of evolution from textbooks, that fault line is usually the battleground between religious zealots that desire to inculcate their biblical worldviews into the formal education system.
Of course there are also contests to control history, sex education, politics, etc, because those are far more political.
The periodic table though, hoo boy, that's a new one.
Yes, there are plenty of people in the US who are proudly and aggressively ignorant for ideological reasons, but what does that have to do with a discussion of what's going on India?
As with a lot of India news appearing here of late, take this with a pound of salt. Like you were saying, this makes no sense as a political move. Hinduism (and by extension Hindutva, the problematic political form) has no bone to pick with Darwin and evolution. Actually the opposite is true - it's likely to be promoted because evolution is a point of contention in Abrahamic religions. The Indian far-right promotes a lot of fabrications; this isn't one of them though.
The two academics quoted in the article come from JNU, which is known for its left/far-left leaning. Looking through their social media, I see retweets of: US stealing Syria's oil, opposition to bombing Syria and aiding Ukraine, etc. What does it say about the author of the story, if she can't see through biases? It's kinda disappointing that balanced opinions are becoming rare in news media.
Fake news.
These topics are covered in the relevant (Science) stream in class 12 now. This is simply rationalization of the subjects to reduce burden on the students.
On a related note, I see quite a bit of fake news posted here...
I agrée, I also did not have that impression from what I could tell. This is really bad.
All talk about demographic dividends and such are moot when such stupidity is ushered in and allowed to prevail. They may be squandering a real opportunity here.
This is the same country that tried to derail the building of a shipping channel because it would have destroyed a bridge built by a monkey army, also known as limestone shoal.
Historically it has never been. Even in day to day life neither science nor evolution or periodic table has been debated. While it could be very innocuous, the new BJP government is also a bit on the "our history, our culture" side.
I am hoping this is just the NCERT just removing modules that students just rote learn.
> like to see 1st source statements from the board indicating that these changes are religiously motivated.
Nobody responsible or involved with this process is gonna give a written statement that they did to please the evergrowing hindutva or modi bhakti or whatsapp university.
You've not seen the back cover of textbooks that says X or Y is only possible because of the generosity of the "Insert current Chief Minister of State?"
This is more likely for the reasons to be innocuous.
> In explaining its changes, NCERT states on its website that it considered whether content overlapped with similar content covered elsewhere, the difficulty of the content, and whether the content was irrelevant. It also aims to provide opportunities for experiential learning and creativity.
> NCERT announced the cuts last year, saying that they would ease pressures on students studying online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amitabh Joshi, an evolutionary biologist at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru, India, says that science teachers and researchers expected that the content would be reinstated once students returned to classrooms. Instead, the NCERT shocked everyone by printing textbooks for the new academic year with a statement that the changes will remain for the next two academic years, in line with India’s revised education policy approved by government in July 2020.
Sounds more like students have continued lagging behind after coming back from Covid, than anything malicious. I have literally never heard of national politicians in India being anti-science.
I might be wrong, but I would genuinely like to see 1st source statements from the board indicating that these changes are religiously motivated.