It is ironic but perhaps fitting of the times we live in that a Prime Minister who is so keen to take India on a path different from the one its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, had embarked on, would create a post in his council of ministers for a minister with independent charge for alternative medicines like ayurveda, naturopathy, unani and homeopathy, and yoga. Narendra Modi elevated a department to ministerial status weeks before the 125th birth anniversary of Nehru, which falls on Friday. This, from a politician who promised maximum governance, minimum government—by creating a new ministry, with all its attendant paraphernalia. This is getting beyond satire. If clichés have a meaning, Nehru would have turned in his grave, except that for Nehru facts mattered, not myths, and he wasn’t buried but cremated; and second, science mattered to him, and he knew that once dead, bodies don’t turn in their graves.

Nehru trusted science over faith. He was at least an agnostic, if not an atheist; the phrase “scientific temper" became associated with him. So frustrated was he by an India which continues to coexist in several centuries at the same time, that he wanted to drag it to the 20th, and he thought the way forward was through modernity and science. Modi, on the other hand, seems content with repeating homilies about a once-great civilization, relying on its literature and myths to look for sources of inspiration.

During his curious address at the United Nations, Modi expounded on the virtues of yoga, claiming that it could help the fight against global warming. A few weeks later, while inaugurating a modernized hospital in Mumbai, he told an audience of Bollywood stars, doctors, and city elite how once upon a time Indians knew everything, sounding like a character from the British comedy Goodness Gracious Me, where the grumpy father insists that Indians did everything first. Modi said: “We can feel proud of what our country achieved in medical science at one point of time… We all read about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realize that the Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his mother’s womb... We worship Lord Ganesha. There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery."

Such anecdotal stories may be amusing at an adda or a bar where a village elder goes on about how great things used to be. But as prime minister, Modi is in a position to influence the nation’s direction. He is, of course, free to have such beliefs. But not only does he talk about them in public, he lends such beliefs authority by endorsing them. He has written the foreword to Dinanath Batra’s fanciful theories which not only rewrite science but recreate history, redraw maps, and reassign roles to races and ethnic groups.

Now think of Nehru on his birth anniversary: His priority was to capture the rational impulse of science, of the spirit of inquiry, of building a nation’s future based on reason and rationality. He wanted India to cultivate “a scientific temper," a term he first used in 1946. At independence, Nehru said: “Science alone... can solve the problems of hunger and poverty, of insanitation and illiteracy, of superstition and deadening customs." For him, science would pave the way towards self-sufficiency, which was a cornerstone of his concept of national security. Indeed, Nehru got many things wrong, particularly his faith in the state’s ability to manage, control, and run the economy—Soviet-style planned economy is his gift to the nation—and he saw great promise in state-led industry to invest significant resources to build a massive public sector. A newly-independent country could not rely on the private sector to respond to all the needs of the nation. (His belief in the public sector was misplaced, but in the first flush of post-colonial independence, his distrust of capitalism, the building block of imperialism that colonised countries, was understandable). He called those steel plants and power plants “temples of modern India." And he built institutions for the academia, arts, and sciences, which have stood the test of time, giving a purpose and meaning to the idea of Indian nationhood.

Nehru’s sustained and spontaneous political support to the idea of promoting scientific temper left a deep imprint. It was Nehru, with able ministers like Maulana Azad, who established the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (and concurrently, of Management). He called the first IIT “a fine monument of India, representing India’s urges, India’s future in the making." India’s achievements in space, including the recent Mars mission, owe their origin to the free rein and resources he gave to Indian space scientists to explore that final frontier—Vikram Sarabhai with space, Homi Bhabha with nuclear energy—and they flourished in his time. India’s large network of research laboratories, of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research and the Defence Research and Development Organization, as well as the atomic energy establishment were all set up in Nehru’s time—in his 17 years in office, some 45 labs were established. The muscular prowess the present government wants to boast about was nourished by Nehruvian nurturing.

But more than those buildings—the so-called hardware—he wanted scientific thinking to be mainstreamed—in other words, infuse it with software. When he inaugurated the 34th session of the Indian Science Congress in early 1947, he said: “Science would try to solve the problems of new India by rapid planned development in all sectors and try to make her more and more scientific minded". Part of the reason of science’s declining influence lay in the resilience of faith and traditions in India; part of the blame also goes to Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, who in her later years as prime minister relied on godmen and astrologers, and performed quixotic rituals to appease evil powers, setting the standard for others to follow.

In some important ways, Modi is Indira Gandhi’s rightful heir, and despite the campaign rhetoric, he is taking India the full circle by legitimizing obscurantists by endorsing them, by repeating their theories, and by allowing them to influence India’s textbooks. That we have journeyed from Nehru’s aspirations, where labs would help solve India’s complex problems, to Modi’s assertions recalling miracles, shows the direction the country has taken. Nehru respected and interpreted India’s past, and wanted to infuse modernity to take India forward; Modi elevates the past in ways that undermine modernity. If he doesn’t believe in this myth-making, he needs to say so publicly and quickly and promote scientific temper once again—that would be a fitting tribute to Nehru. Respecting the achievements of elders and ancestors is an Indian tradition, after all.

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