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NEW DELHI/ JALANDHAR: Two lectures at the Indian Science Congress in which scientists, including the vice-chancellor of a state university, made claims about achievements of ancient Indians have created a new controversy. These claims have highlighted a fundamental problem for the congress: in the past few years, what had once been a gathering of the country’s most reputed scientific minds has become a platform for numerous such statements based on mythology.

On Friday, Andhra University vice-chancellor G Nageswara Rao, a professor of inorganic chemistry, claimed that Kauravas from the Indian mythological epic Mahabharata were born using stem cell technology and that Ravana from the Ramayana had 24 types of aircraft and that Sri Lanka at that time had airports. Rao then explained evolution and human civilization while talking about the Dasavatara or 10 incarnations of Vishnu. He said this at a session which included children in the audience.

At the same session, K J Krishnan, a scientist at a centre in Tamil Nadu, claimed that the theories of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein were wrong and would be disproved. He said gravitational waves would soon be renamed as ‘ Narendra Modi waves’, while the gravitational lensing effect in physics would be renamed as ‘Harsh Vardhan effect’. He went on to claim that electricity and magnetism were the same phenomena.

This was not the first time that the congress has witnessed such claims. In the Mumbai session in January 2015, Anand J Bodas, principal of a pilot training school in Kerala and Ameya Jadhav, lecturer at a Mumbai junior college, presented a paper within a symposium titled ‘Ancient Sciences Through Sanskrit’. Bodas and Jadhav claimed that ancient Indians had invented aircraft that could fly in multiple directions and had even reached other planets. They cited as reference a text known as the ‘Vaimanika Shastra’, which has descriptions and some diagrams of what have been claimed to be ancient aircraft. The text, claimed to have been written by the Vedic sage Bharadwaja is, however, dated to 1904 and scientists earlier had concluded that the designs in it were unrealistic and such aircraft could not have achieved flight. Prior to the congress, noted scientists had objected to the paper being presented because of its pseudo-scientific nature.

At the same symposium, other papers were presented on ‘Engineering applications of ancient Indian botany’, ‘Neuro-science of yoga’ and ‘Advances in surgery in Ancient India’, all of which claimed ancient Indians had made fantastic inventions predating ideas in the West in the Early Modern period. Addressing delegates at the session, Union science and technology minister Harsh Vardhan claimed that ancient Indian mathematicians had discovered the Pythagoras theorem “but very gracefully allowed the Greeks to take the credit”.

At the 105th Indian Science Congress at Imphal in March 2018, Vardhan had claimed that the late British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking had stated that the Vedas contained a “theory superior to that of Einstein’s e equals mc squared equation”.

Mainstream scientists have expressed displeasure over these claims. Regarding the latest lecture by the Andhra University VC, the Indian Science Congress Association has expressed shock. “I feel very sad about the type of things he presented before the children. I had told our team to keep a check and that nothing unscientific should be spoken about from the stage. It is shocking when a person of the stature of a state university VC speaks like this,” said ISCA general president Manoj Kumar Chakrabarti, a biologist.

“All the abstracts of the papers to be presented at the sessions were scrutinised properly. The research papers were all above board and had no unscientific claims. However Rao came just for a talk at the Children’s Congress. The speech was not vetted as it must have been assumed that a vice-chancellor could give an inspiring talk to the children. I will now have to check how Rao got invited to give the lecture and whether there was a hint of what the contents of it would be,” Chakrabarti added.

ISCA general secretary Premendu P Mathur said, “Science is based on citation, logical explanation and experimentation. Had I been there, I would have questioned him about it. One should have asked him for evidence.”

However, on Saturday Rao stood by his claims. “Ramayana and Mahabharata are not mythology, but history. Because we don’t understand it today, we can’t say that it’s not science,” he told TOI over the phone.

“I stated that now test tube baby and stem cell technology are known and probably Kauravas were born through a similar mechanism. I am relating present-day science with what happened during the Mahabharata period. Otherwise how could there be 100 sons from a single mother. About Ravana, if he had aircraft there must have been infrastructure and fuel for it,” Rao added.

Such claims have led to noted scientists staying away from sessions of the congress in the past. In 2016, Indian-born Nobel laureate V Ramakrishnan, a biologist at Cambridge University, had objected to religious ideas being mixed with science. “I attended the congress once and very little science was discussed. I will never attend it again. The idea that Indians had aircraft 2000 years ago sounds almost essentially impossible to me.

