Modi's Make in India campaign forward?

Will jingoism dressed up as science take Modi's Make in India campaign forward?

On Sunday, the Indian Science Congress that is currently underway in Mumbai had 14 sessions covering a wide range of subjects from number theory to environmental health, but what hogged the headlines was an outlandish claim that 7,000 years ago India had planes that could travel between planets.

The speaker who made the claim didn't stop with that. He went on to add finer details of these planes such as their size, number of engines and a RADAR system that could show the shape of a plane and not just the blip.

What's more, there were also assertions that ancient Indians were proficient in surgery and had produced surgical instruments which looked like the modern tools. The claims on surgery were of course attributed to names that are familiar to us - Charaka and Sushruta.

The revelations were not based on any empirical evidence that researchers dug out, but were apparently drawn from ancient texts. The source for the aviation invention was "Vaimanika Prakarana", the details of which abound on the internet, while for surgery, the speaker quoted "Sushruta Samhita" that practitioners of Indian medicine often refer to lend authenticity to their work.

The session that sought to make India proud of its ancient proficiency on science and technology was titled Ancient sciences through Sanskrit and obviously the speakers freaked out. And it was the first time that the century old Indian Science Congress Association, incidentally founded by two British chemists, featured anything like this.

What distinguishes science from pseudosciences is evidence and peer review. Both start with a hypothesis. While science rigorously scrutinises the evidence for and against the hypothesis, pseudoscience looks only for suitable evidence. It either abandons or hides the conflicting evidence. Science needs reproducible results and pays no attention to anecdotes, while pseudoscience relies largely on exceptions, personal testimonies and stories.

And most importantly, science is peer reviewed and it’s progressive - more and more is found on the invention as time progresses, while in pseudoscience, the revelation is static and it adds no value to human life. As the famous Anglo-Irish physicist George Johnston Stoney had noted, "a theory is a supposition which we hope to be true, a hypothesis is a supposition which we expect to be useful; fictions belong to the realm of art; if made to intrude elsewhere, they become either make-believes or mistakes".

The grand proclamations on ancient science at the Science Congress, unfortunately belong to the realm of art. And it was not new either, because we have read it many times in Indian mythology which is full of mind-blowing ideas, limitless imagination and philosophic wisdom. They do have tremendous value for human life and even scientific exploration, but they are not science, but only a work of art. Claiming authorship of technological inventions because they were once fantasised by ancient Indians is against the principle of science that the Indian Science Congress seeks to pursue.

Unfortunately, the claims on ancient science on Sunday reeked of mythology, a certain ideology and pure jingoism. What's the purpose of the claims that India possessed 40-engine inter-planetary planes when the National Aerospace Laboratory is unable to produce even a prototype of an usable passenger aircraft after so many years of its expensive existence? In contrast, Brazil and China, which make no claims to ancient wisdom on aeronautical engineering have thriving aerospace industries. About 96 percent of the component cost of Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, reportedly, is on imported items.

The status of technological advances is similar in many other national undertakings such as the DRDO and the Indian nuclear energy sector. Besides the plane, ancient science experts also claim that Indian were pioneers of rocket technology although most of its present successes had to rely on imported expertise and materials.

What's the purpose of the tall claims made by people such as Anand Bodas (the author of the plane story) at the Science Congress? Whatever is the objective, it will certainly not encourage scientific exploration because real scientists and students of science know the primacy of evidence and peer review.

So who does it excite? Charlatans, pseudoscientists and ultra-nationalists. Such a pity that an institution such as the Indian Science Congress Association had been misused for this purpose.

Karl Marx had said in his Das Kapital: "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.” That is the message the Science Congress should sent out if India wants to catch up with the rest of the world in scientific excellence and not jingoism dressed up as science.

Will ancient knowledge help Indians make everything in India?