Who should get
the “Foot-Firmly-In-Mouth” award amongst the BJP’s top players? On current
form, the bookies must be dividing their bets between West Bengal governor
Jagdeep “Atomic Arrows” Dhankar and BJP West Bengal state President Dilip “We
shot them like dogs” Ghosh who boasted proudly about the brutal police tactics
in BJP states.
But also in the running from the ruling party is
a star cast that can be relied on to be effortlessly offensive or insist that
every achievement of Western science was already there in the Vedas or the
Mahabharata. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi, early on his tenure, memorably
told an audience in a Mumbai hospital that there must have been a plastic
surgeon who fixed on Lord Ganesha’s elephant head.
Other serial
offenders include Bengal’s own Tathagata Roy, who was the Meghalaya governor,
but who’s been on leave since he said people who didn’t like divisiveness
should be packed off to North Korea. Roy left Shillong in mid-December amidst
predictions he wouldn’t be returning but he just recently met home minister
Amit Shah and it looks like he may yet have a chance of keeping his job. Roy is
a serial offender who has let rip on his Twitter feed.
Then there’s minister for animal husbandry,
Giriraj Singh, who, during a heated election campaign in Begusarai, Bihar,
roared out a threat during an election rally: “Those who cannot say Vande
Mataram or cannot respect the Motherland, the nation will never forgive them.”
He went on to attack Muslims who bury their dead unlike his warrior ancestors
for whom “no grave was built”.
The BJP’s
‘foot-in-the-mouth contenders’ fall roughly into two categories:
·
Those who revel in
obscurantism and disown all science or insist that all wisdom and scientific
discoveries were already known and practised in the Mahabharata, Vedas or
ancient India.
·
Those who are constantly
praising cows, and their urine and dung, nicknamed by some the “udderly
nonsense brigade.”
(There is a third
category, those who can’t conceal their disdain for anything non-Hindu. But
we're not getting into that now.)
Jagdeep Dhankar (January 14, 2020): The West Bengal
Governor startled an audience at the 45th Eastern India Science Fair by
insisting that flying machines existed during the Ramayana and that Arjuna’s
arrows were nuclear powered. “It is said that the plane was invented in 1910 or
1911. But if we delve into our scriptures, we will see in the Ramayana that we
had the ‘uran khatola’ (aeroplanes). He added: “The arrows of
Arjuna in Mahabharata had atomic power in it (sic)”
Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Minister of Science & Technology
Challenging
the Theory of Evolution
Satyapal Singh (July 19, 2019, June 30, 2018 and January 20180: The
minister of state for higher education has a bone to pick with Charles Darwin
and the Theory of Evolution. He memorably told Parliament: “Our culture says we
are the children of rishis. I don’t
want to offend people who believe that we are the children of monkeys but
according to our culture we are children of rishis.”
He was ticked off by DMK MP Kanimozhi who noted she was a homo sapien and her
parents were Shudras. Satyapal Singh, a former Mumbai police commissioner, has
been pushing for the Theory of Evolution to be erased from textbooks and his
clinching argument is there are no witnesses who saw a monkey turning into a
man.
Narendra Modi (October 2014): In a talk before Mumbai doctors, the
Prime Minister harkened back to the Vedic era, saying: “If we talk about space
science, our ancestors had, at some point, displayed great strengths in space
science. What people like Aryabhata had said centuries ago is being recognised
by science today. What I mean to say is that we are a country which had these
capabilities. We need to regain them.”
Harsh
Vardhan (January 4, 2015): The Union
minister for science & technology said India discovered algebra and the
Pythagorean Theorem, but then it generously allowed others to claim the credit.
“Our scientists discovered the Pythagoras Theorem. We gave credit to the
Greeks.” Similarly, he said India allowed the Arabs to claim credit for
algebra.
In March 2018, soon after Stephen Hawking died,
Vardhan jumped into the arena again to insist Hawking had said the Vedas might
have had knowledge about a scientific principle that was greater and more
powerful than Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. When pressed for details of this
unknown statement by Hawking, the minister said it was up to reporters to find
it. Troublingly, the minister made these statements at an Indian Science
Congress meeting.
Biplab Deb, Chief minister of Assam
Biplab
Deb (March 2018); The Tripura chief
minister, a former gym instructor, waded into the Mahabharata and insisted the
blind king Dhritarashtra was getting constant updates from the battlefield at
Kurukshetra, and this must indicate the existence of satellite communication
and the Internet. Deb offered fodder for the Twitterati on another occasion
when he insisted that civil engineers, not mechanical engineers, were best
suited to be civil servants.
Anant Kumar
Hegde (June 21, 2018): The former
Union minister for skills development is a fan of Sanskrit and even took his
oath in Parliament in the language. He insists eminent scientists around the
world are coming round to the view that Sanskrit will be the language of future
supercomputers. He hasn’t mentioned the names of these eminent scientists.
January 2019: Inevitably, all manner of
academics and others are following the example of the BJP’s top leaders. One
such was G. Nageshwar Rao, vice chancellor of Andhra University, who dipped
into the Mahabharata and told the Indian Science Congress that the 100 Kauravas
were "because of stem cell and test tube technology." He also insisted
that, “Lord Vishnu used guided missiles known as Vishnu Chakra.”
Pragya Thakur, BJP Member of Parliament
Cow and its
many healing powers
Pragya
Thakur (April 22, 2019): All the
BJP’s leaders bow before gau mata, but
the star of the cow debate is undoubtedly Pragya Thakur, who’s also known as
Sadhvi Pragya and is an accused in the Malegaon bombings in which six persons
were killed. Thakur famously insisted she was cured of cancer by drinking cow
urine. “I cured myself by consuming gau mutr (cow urine) and Panchgavya mixed
Ayurvedic herbs,” she said. Pachagavya is a mix of cow dung, urine and milk,
mixed in the right proportions. Her doctors then spoke up to slam her claims
and noted that she had several surgeries including a mastectomy. Pragya asserts
other illnesses too can be cured by getting close and comfortable with a cow.
She advises that if you rub a cow correctly, it can take care of blood
pressure.
Giriraj Singh (January 14, 2020): The Union minister for fisheries,
animal husbandry and dairying is a serial offender who is constantly making the
headlines with bizarre comments. Most recently, he asked scientists to conduct
further research into cow dung and urine, saying this would lead to dairy
farmers making more money from their cows and not abandoning them when they
could no longer produce milk.
Harish Rawat (February 8, 2018): The former Uttarakhand chief
minister did not mention whether he does it himself, but asked everyone in the
BJP to drink cow urine.
Trivendra
Singh Rawat (July 28, 2019): The
Uttarakhand chief minister gave science a new twist by insisting that cows are
the only creatures in the animal kingdom that both inhale and exhale oxygen. He
also insisted that living in close proximity with a cow can cure tuberculosis.
He didn’t specify the distance that had to be kept. On another occasion, he
said pregnant women should drink water from Garud Ganga in Bageshwar district
to avoid caesareans.
Ranjit
Shrivastava (July 28, 2019):
Shrivastava is a little-known BJP leader from Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, who has
garnered a degree of fame by insisting that cows are Hindus and therefore their
bodies should not be buried since burial is a Muslim ritual. Instead, dead cows
should be wrapped in white and cremated on a traditional Hindu pyre or an
electric crematorium should be built for them. Shrivastava also memorably said,
"Cows in the houses of Muslims should be taken back. When we consider
girls from our homes going to their homes as 'love jihad', shouldn't we
consider 'gau mata' going to their homes 'love jihad' too?” To replace the cows,
he suggested Muslims rear goats, asserting, “Goat is their mother.”
Unsurprisingly, the BJP leaders have proved to
be inspirations for others who have taken to constantly discovering new powers
and properties of cows. Scientists at Junagadh Agricultural University, for
instance, say that after five years of study, they have found traces of gold in
cow urine. The scientists say they were led to finding the gold in cow urine by
references in the Atharva Veda. They also offered the theory that more gold is
present in cow urine in the summer than during the monsoon. These findings have
been submitted for further validation, the university’s vice chancellor has
said.
In the same month (April 26, 2018), Biplab Deb,
when he talked about the Internet in ancient India, also launched an outlandish
attack on beauty queen Diana Hayden. Deb insisted Aishwariya Rai, who won the
Miss World title in 1994, represents “Indian beauty” and not Hayden, crowned
Miss World in 1997 and who is a Christian. He also called cosmetics “an alien
concept,” saying Indian women didn’t use them “in the old times” and “did not
use shampoo.” Instead, women washed their hair in methi water and bathed in
mud.
The above are some of the prominent people in the BJP who have a scientific bent of mind.
This has been written by Paran Balakrishnan for The Statesman
This has been written by Paran Balakrishnan for The Statesman
