Saima Ikram
An Indian scientist said that Albert Einstein was wrong and that gravitational waves should be renamed “Narendra Modi Waves”
India has a long tradition of replacing myth with science that leads to a fringe culture of pseudoscience. Being under the part of Narendra Modi, pseudoscience has moved from fringe to mainstream as the Prime Minister himself set the tone by claiming in 2014 that cosmetic surgery was practiced in the country thousands of years ago.
Recently, the 106th Indian Science Congress was inaugurated by the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi that ran 3rd to 7th January. At the congress, the some academics dismissed the findings of Isaac newton and Albert Einstein. According to BBC, A group of scientists hit out at speakers with irrational claims that included the invention of the stem cell research by the ancient Hindus.
An old Hindu text was cited as a proof by the head of the southern Indian University where he made the claim and the vice chancellor of Andhra University G Nageshwar Rao stated that a demon king from the Hindu religious epic, Ramayana, possessed 24 kinds of aircrafts as well as a network of landing strips in today’s Sri Lanka. But critics have responded by saying that the text should have been read and enjoyed because they had nothing to do with science.
According to the general secretary of Indian Scientific Congress association, the association does not subscribe to the views of those people and distance itself from their comments. Such kind of utterances by responsible people is of a big concern for the whole society.
These claims hark back to an imagined Hindu past in order to boost the religious nationalism. Such claims help to propagate quack science and erode the scientific temper. According to an economist Kaushik Basu, it is important that time is spent on science, mathematics, and literature for progress of a nation instead of time showing that what the ancestors did 5,000 years ago.
