The BJP’S cynical assault on science

Project Syndicate (Prague)

India’s junior education minister recently dismissed Darwin’s theory of evolution on the grounds that “nobody, including our ancestors, has said or written that they ever saw an ape turning into a human being”. This bizarre statement is just the latest anti-scientific salvo to come from members of India’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), says Shashi Tharoor. Last year, Rajasthan’s education minister claimed that cows are the only animal that inhales and exhales oxygen. A senior judge in the same state claimed that India’s national bird, the peacock, was a “lifelong celibate” that impregnates the peahen by shedding a tear. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has encouraged this cynical assault on rationality as part of his effort to “transform secular India into a Hindu state”. He himself once claimed that global warming was “just a state of mind”. It’s a deeply depressing trend. “The obscurantist and atavistic state that the BJP wants to create would look nothing like the one that made India the scientific superpower of the ancient age.”