Growing audacity of pseudoscience forces

The Allahabad HC judgment has given such claims judicial respectability. Unless set aside or struck down by the apex court, it will remain a part of judicial annals and may come in handy in cow-related cases in other courts. It also comes as a shot in the arm for the anti-science chatter. People engaging in such talk are influencing public policies and attitudes.

Remedy: The scientific community must proactively promote scientific temper. Reuters

Dinesh C Sharma

Science Commentator

The Allahabad High Court last week gave a judgment in a bail case that has made national headlines not for its legal luminance, but its staunch promotion of pseudoscience. The judgment liberally quoted unnamed scientists to say that “scientists believed that cow is the only animal which inhales and exhales oxygen.”

It also declared that panchgavya — a concoction of cow milk, curd, ghee, cow urine and dung — helps in the treatment of several incurable diseases.

The widely held religious belief that using ghee made of cow milk in performing a yagya is beneficial to humans also got judicial approval in the same order. Burning cow ghee “gives special energy to sunrays which ultimately causes rains,” the judge reasoned.

All this was stated as ‘scientific’ in the course of citing the plethora of cultural, religious, political and legal justifications for cow protection.

What the judgment has stated is not new. It has only reinforced such claims which have been doing the rounds on WhatsApp groups and several digital portals for some years now. Many politicians and those holding high offices have endorsed such claims from time to time. Rajasthan’s Education Minister Vasudev Devnani, in January 2017, claimed that “the cow is the only animal that can inhale and exhale oxygen.” The claim was repeated on the floor of the Uttarakhand Assembly by Animal Husbandry Minister Rekha Arya in September 2018. The then Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat supported her, while adding his two cents — “Breathing problems can be cured by massaging a cow” — in July 2019.

The HC judgment has now given such claims judicial respectability. Unless set aside or struck down by the apex court, it will remain a part of judicial annals and may come in handy in cow-related cases in other courts. Besides becoming legal precedence, the judgment comes as a shot in the arm for the growing strength of anti-science forces in India.

These tendencies started with some stray claims about the Pushpak airplane and plastic surgery in ancient times being made at events like the Indian Science Congress. Nobody in mainstream science bothered about them, saying such fringe elements were not worth any attention.

This emboldened a few attention-seeking legislators and ministers to go public with similar statements. Satyapal Singh, who was Minister of State for Higher Education in 2018, rejected Darwin’s theory of evolution, saying that it was “unscientific.” It was the ‘earth-is-flat’ moment for India and marked the beginning of sharper attacks on modern science and scientific methods.

In the next phase of the anti-science bandwagon, some self-styled gurus (who are also social media influencers) and Padma-awardee motivational speakers started attacking allopathic medicine, particle physics, immunology and so on.

Journals of dubious quality are also publishing pseudoscience. In one such instance, cardiologist BM Hegde explained auto-immune diseases this way: “Whereas every cell in the human body, of which there are more than one hundred trillion in all, love one another and also the cells of others in the world, our hostility toward our fellow human beings confuses our cells. If that mental attitude deepens further into a trait, a time will come when our own cells start hating our other cells, an auto-immune disease. I call this as the you-me concept.” This is no different from the “me in me talking to me” mumbo-jumbo propagated by Swami Nithyananda.

The growing anti-science chatter is not a harmless social media storm or trend. People engaging in such talk are influencing public policies and also people's attitudes. As a follow-up to his Darwin statement, Satyapal Singh vowed to remove the theory from school and college curricula. Sadhguru’s ‘river rejuvenation’ plan has been adopted by the NITI Aayog and several state governments, while Ramdev’s Patanjali is part of certain education boards of the government. Hegde has been a member of several expert panels and policy-making initiatives in Karnataka and elsewhere. The Central Government’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) has funded a research scheme which goes by a quirky acronym of SUTRA-PIC (Scientific Utilisation Through Research Augmentation Prime Products from Indigenous Cows).

Many instances were reported during the second wave of the pandemic this year, showing how pseudoscience talk influences people’s behaviour and attitudes. In many places, those who had breathing difficulties and were unable to get a hospital bed, flocked to peepal trees, believing WhatsApp messages that told them that peepal emits more oxygen than other trees.

Much of vaccine hesitancy also has something to do with similar messages. During the pandemic, leading consumer companies have also leaned on pseudoscience to market health and wellness products.

The only way to prevent anti-science from taking deeper roots and pseudoscience getting mainstreamed is to promote scientific temper. Civil society organisations like the All India People’s Science Movement and Breakthrough Science Society as well as science activists like Pranav Radhakrishnan are vocal about pseudoscience. We need more such voices.

However, scientific agencies like the DST and CSIR remain silent, and at times, are complicit. They spend huge sums of money on the publicity of events and ministers, but not on people’s engagement in science. Scientists who engage with people and media on scientific issues are being punished under the garb of official conduct rules. There are government-funded bodies for science popularisation which are mandated to debunk superstitions and anti-science tendencies. But they are collaborating with dubious organisations whose record on pseudoscience is not above board.

Science academies and scientific departments can at least debunk pseudoscience through proactive fact-checking and educate people about the method of science. Scientific temper is a way of life based on critical thinking and the ability to question.

The present state of affairs has a lot to do with our education system, particularly, the teaching of science. The scientific community should come forward to remedy the situation. Science academies took a stand on certain issues such as Satyapal Singh’s statement, but they should develop a long-term blueprint to improve science education at the school level and promote rational thinking.