There have been serious questions raised about India's secularism since its independence in 1947. Such questions have gained new urgency with the rapid rise of Hindu Nationalists and the election of BJP leader Narendra Modi in 2014.

Serious doubts about India's claim of secularism were articulated well by Indian journalist Kapil Komireddy in an Op Ed piece he wrote for the UK's Guardian newspaper a few years ago. Here's an excerpt of it:

"Indian Muslims in particular have rarely known a life uninterrupted by communal conflict or unimpaired by poverty and prejudice. Their grievances are legion, and the list of atrocities committed against them by the Indian state is long. In 2002 at least 1,000 Muslims were slaughtered by Hindu mobs in the western state of Gujarat in what was the second state-sponsored pogrom in India (Sikhs were the object of the first, in 1984). Gujarat's chief minister, Narendra Modi, explained away the riots by quoting Newton's third law. "Every action," he said on television, "has an equal opposite reaction." The "action" that invited the reaction of the mobs was the torching of a Gujarat-bound train in which 59 Hindus pilgrims, most of them saffron-clad bigots who were returning home from a trip to the site of the Babri Mosque that they had helped demolish a decade earlier, perished. The "equal and opposite reaction" was the slaughter of 1,000 innocent Muslims for the alleged crime of their coreligionists."

Komireddy goes on to describe how India's "liberal" elite rationalize sectarianism in "secular" India:

"The novelist Shashi Tharoor tried to burnish this certifiably sectarian phenomenon with a facile analogy: Indian Muslims, he wrote, accept Hindu rituals at state ceremonies in the same spirit as teetotallers accept champagne in western celebrations. This self-affirming explanation is characteristic of someone who belongs to the majority community. Muslims I interviewed took a different view, but understandably, they were unwilling to protest for the fear of being labelled as "angry Muslims" in a country famous for its tolerant Hindus."

The Sangh Parivar's project to Hinduize India has accelerated with the landslide victory of BJP leader Narendra Modi and his inauguration as Prime Minister of India in 2014. Some of the manifestations of this phenomenon as reported by the Washington Post are as as follows:

1.The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (or the World Hindu Council) launched a program called “Gharwapsi” (or Homecoming) to urge India’s Muslims and Christians to convert to Hinduism, which they said was the religion of their ancestors. It has resulted in many reported instances of forced mass conversions of Christians and Muslims to Hinduism.

2.  Beef sales have been banned in several Indian states. The most egregious of such laws is the Maharashtra state law that criminalizes possession or consumption of beef.

3. Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj has said the Hindu scripture Bhagwad Gita must be declared a “national scripture.” Another BJP politician, Manohar Lal Khattar, the chief minister of the northern Haryana state has said Bhagwad Gita is considered more important than India’s secular Constitution.

4. Poor school children are being denied eggs, a cheap protein needed by growing youngsters, in their school lunches by India's vegetarian Hindu elite, according an NPR report.  

The above changes are just the tip of a much larger iceberg of Hindu transformation of India with major appointments of Hindu ideologues by ruling party to key positions in education and media posts at the center and the provinces.

It's not just in India that the Hindu Nationalists are gaining strength. Their programs receive significant funding and support from non-resident Indians (NRIs). A report entitled "Hindu Nationalism in the United States: A Report on Non-Profit Gro... makes the following assertions regarding the strength and nature of the Hindu nationalist movement in the United States:

 a. Over the last three decades, a movement toward Hinduizing India--advancing the status of Hindus toward political and social primacy in India-- has continued to gain ground in South Asia and diasporic communities. The Sangh Parivar (the Sangh "family"), the network of groups at the forefront of this Hindu nationalist movement, has an estimated membership numbering in the millions, making the Sangh one of the largest voluntary associations in India. The major organizations in the Sangh include the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), Bajrang Dal, and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

b. Hindu nationalism has intensified and multiplied forms of discrimination, exclusion, and gendered and sexualized violence against Muslims, Christians, other minorities, and those who oppose Sangh violations, as documented by Indian citizens and international tribunals, fact-finding groups, international human rights organizations, and U.S. governmental bodies.

c. India-based Sangh affiliates receive social and financial support from its U.S.-based wings, the latter of which exist largely as tax-exempt non-profit organizations in the United States: Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), Vishwa Hindu Parishad of America (VHPA), Sewa International USA, Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation-USA. The Overseas Friends of the Bharatiya Janata Party - USA (OFBJP) is active as well, though it is not a tax-exempt group.

Acceleration of "secular" India's total Hindu-ization under Prime Minister Modi represents a sea change for South Asia region and the world. It could prove to be very destabilizing for India, a much larger and far more diverse country than its neighboring Islamic Pakistan. Such instability could derail India's economic rise unless its forced Hindu-ization is checked by the country's leadership with external pressure from India's friends. And its effects will be strongly felt far outside the borders of India. It is already causing serious issues between India and Pakistan that could lead a devastating war in South Asia with severe consequences for the entire world.

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Comment by Riaz Haq on June 29, 2017 at 7:40am
Toll From Vigilante Mobs Rises, and #India Begins to Recoil. #hinduterrorism #Modi #Lynchistan #Islamophobia #Cow
 
 
“It does no damage whatsoever to Modi and his party, because what this protest says is, ‘Muslims are getting lynched,’ and a lot of Hindutvas out there will say, ‘That’s the point,’ ” Mr. Vij said, referring to far-right Hindus. “Society at large is turning right-wing. How long that crest is going to be is the most interesting question, and the fact is nobody knows. Not anytime soon.”
 
On Thursday, Junaid Khan, a 15-year-old madrasa student, was riding a crowded passenger train home from Delhi when a group of assailants, after deriding him as a “beefeater” and removing his skullcap, fatally stabbed him and threw him off the train. The same day, in Kashmir, Mohammed Ayub Pandith, a plainclothes police officer, was beaten to death outside a mosque by members of a mob who took him for an informer.
 
The hashtag “Lynchistan” trended on Twitter. “May the silent be damned,” wrote the scholar Pratap Bhanu Mehta in a furious column. And Saba Dewan, a filmmaker living outside Delhi, wrote a Facebook post calling for a protest against rising violence toward Muslims and lower-caste Indians, and the idea spread with extraordinary speed, inspiring demonstrations in 11 cities. On Wednesday evening, about 2,000 people gathered at sunset in central Delhi, carrying posters with the words “Not in My Name.”
 
“One needs not only to protest, but to record our complete anguish,” said Amitabha Pande, a retired civil servant who voted for Narendra Modi in 2014, in the hope that as prime minister he would modernize India’s economy. He said his faith in Mr. Modi collapsed the following year, when the prime minister failed to condemn the lynching of Mohammad Ikhlaq in the village of Dadri.
 
“He has forgotten the fundamentals of the Constitution that he was supposed to uphold, which is the right to life,” Mr. Pande said. “The fact that he did not come out openly and condemn the Dadri murder, that is when I decided this man does not deserve to be here.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/world/asia/india-lynchings-attac...

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 5, 2017 at 8:31pm

Indian journalist Gauri Lankesh shot dead in Bangalore

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-41169817

A prominent Indian journalist critical of Hindu nationalist politics has been shot dead in the south-western state of Karnataka, police say.
Gauri Lankesh, 55, was found lying in a pool of blood outside her home in the city of Bangalore.
She was shot in the head and chest by gunmen who arrived by motorcycle. The motive for the crime was not clear.
India journalists are being increasingly targeted by radical Hindu nationalists, activists say.
Gauri Lankesh, who edited a weekly newspaper, was known as a fearless and outspoken journalist.
She had returned home in her car on Tuesday night and was opening the gate when the attackers shot her, police said. She died on the spot.

Officials said they suspected she had been under surveillance by the gunmen. An investigation has been opened.
Her death has been widely condemned, with Karnataka state's chief minister Siddaramaiah calling it an "assassination on democracy".

Ms Lankesh came from a well-known family, and edited Lankesh Patrike, a newspaper founded by her father P Lankesh, a left-wing poet and writer.
She was the sister of award-winning filmmaker Kavitha Lankesh.
Who was Gauri Lankesh?
Known for her secularist criticism of right-wing and Hindu nationalists, including members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)
Sympathetic to the Naxalites, or Maoist rebels, and was involved in the reintegration of former rebels
Worked for The Times of India and later ran the newspaper Lankesh Patrike, which her father founded, with her brother Indrajit for several years
She left to start several publications, including her own newspaper Gauri Lankesh Patrike
Ms Lankesh was convicted of defamation in 2016 for a report she published on local BJP leaders.
She was sentenced to six months in jail, and was out on bail and appealing the conviction at the time of her death.
In an interview with Narada News last year shortly after her conviction, she criticised BJP's "fascist and communal politics" and added: "My Constitution teaches me to be a secular citizen, not communal. It is my right to fight against these communal elements."
"I believe in democracy and freedom of expression, and hence, am open to criticism too. People are welcome to call me anti-BJP or anti-Modi, if they want to. They are free to have their own opinion, just as I am free to have my opinion."
'They come on motorbikes, kill, and vanish'
Her killing follows several assassinations of outspoken secularists or rationalists in recent years, including scholar Malleshappa Kalburgi, anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar, and politician Govind Pansare.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 8, 2017 at 7:17am

Indian scientists urged to speak out about pseudoscience
Cancelled astrology workshop prompts calls for researchers to be vigilant about stamping out unscientific beliefs.

T.V Padma
07 November 2017

https://www.nature.com/news/indian-scientists-urged-to-speak-out-ab...


Alarm in the Indian scientific community over anti-science policies and programmes has been brewing for some time. Several scientists who spoke with Nature are reluctant to comment publicly about it for fear of jeopardizing their jobs. Others took part in the March for Science organized by the 7,000-member Breakthrough Science Society in August in around 40 Indian cities, in part to protest the government’s support for ideas not yet backed by science. One area of concern, says Banerjee, is the government’s push for a national research programme on the health and other benefits of a combination of five cow products, known as panchgavya.

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, hosted a two-day workshop last December to discuss ways to validate research on panchgavya, which was supported by India’s Department of Science and Technology, Department of Biotechnology, and Council of Scientific and Industrial research (CSIR), and inaugurated by India’s science minister Harsh Vardhan.

According to IIT Delhi’s website, Vardhan, who is a physician, “emphasised that use of panchgavya in practice and in daily routines will help to address the pressing global issues like climate change, resistance development, malnourishment, global health etc”.

Following the workshop, India’s science ministry formed a national steering committee to initiate a national programme on the topic.

Supporters of this research say that cow products should be considered part of India’s vast traditional knowledge base. But critics say that such unverified theories are pseudoscience, and that singling out the benefits of cow products is part of a larger political agenda by Hindus, for whom the cow is a sacred animal.

They also argue that research on topics such as panchgavya should be handled in a neutral manner rather than as a way of promoting traditional knowledge. Rahul Siddharthan, a computation biologist at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai, says that the government must accept that any research involving traditional hypotheses about health could potentially refute those hypotheses. “Refutability is the essence of science,” he says.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 18, 2017 at 5:01pm

#India's #Modi loving, #Muslim hating #Hindu #Nazis love #Hitler: "Hari Om Heil Hitler", "Aum, Hail Aryan, Hail Aryavart" (Hail Aryans, Hail Land of the Aryans), "Adolf Hitler, the ultimate avatar", "India’s Swastika God"

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/1.828702

Shrenik Rao Dec 14, 2017 6:20 PM


Digging into social media reveals that there is a large and growing community of Indian Hindu Nazis, who are digitally connected to neo-Nazi counterparts across the world.

Other social media sites and online platforms too had their share of strange, yet fanatical admiration for Hitler, reframed with Hindu nationalism. "Hitler was great," said "Hindu Hitler" on rediff.com, a popular Indian web portal. "I too love Hitler and am one of his biggest fans! Hail Hitler!" said one comment on a YouTube channel run by NewsX, a 24-hour English-language news television channel in India. I also found India-based WhatsApp groups discussing Hitler’s "positive contributions." They portrayed him as Germany’s great leader, a "patriotic nationalist," who "punished the "traitors."


This strange adulation for Hitler has already gone beyond social media and entered our educational system. Schools across India have, wittingly or not, propagated Hitler’s "achievements."


In 2004, when now-Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the Chief Minister of Gujarat, school textbooks published by the Gujarat State Board portrayed Hitler as a hero, and glorifyied fascism. The tenth-grade social studies textbook had chapters entitled "Hitler, the Supremo," and "Internal Achievements of Nazism." The section on the "Ideology of Nazism" reads:

"Hitler lent dignity and prestige to the German government. He adopted the policy of opposition towards the Jewish people and advocated the supremacy of the German race."

The tenth-grade social studies textbook, published by the state of Tamil Nadu in 2011 (with multiple revised editions until 2017) includes chapters glorifying Hitler, praising his "inspiring leadership," "achievements" and how the Nazis "glorified the German state" so, "to maintain a German race with Nordic elements, [Hitler] ordered the Jews to be persecuted."


In 2012, when tenth-grade students taking French lessons at a private school in Mumbai were asked to complete a sentence starting with “J’admire” followed by the name of the historical figure they admired most, nine out of 25 students picked Hitler. Students in the south Indian city of Madurai justified their admiration for Hitler, without even knowing that he was the leader of Germany.

Mein Kampf has also gone mainstream, becoming a "must-read" management strategy book for India’s business school students. Professors teaching strategy lecture about how a short, depressed man in prison made a goal of taking over the world and built a strategy to achieve it.

This infamous polemic remains a money-spinner for publishers. English-language editions of Mein Kampf are published by a number of reputable Indian publishing houses, such as Jaico, Printline, Indialog, Maple Press, Mastermind, Prakash, Om Books, Rohan, Adarsh, Ajay, Embassy, Lexicon and Wilco. They fill bookshelves at airports, bookstores and online marketplaces, while cheap pirated versions fill pavement stalls in major cities. Crossword, the Indian book-retailing chain, has sold 25,000 copies in three years. Jaico alone sold 100,000 copies in seven years. It has also been translated into multiple Indian languages – Gujarati, Hindi, Malayalam, Bengal and Tamil – and those editions are sold across India.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 23, 2017 at 7:38am

Organizers postpone #India's major annual #science conference amid fears of anti #Modi protests

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/unusual-move-organizers-post...

In an unprecedented move, organizers of the annual Indian Science Congress have postponed the prestigious event just days before it was supposed to begin. The move apparently reflects concerns that students at the university hosting the congress would stage protests against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was scheduled to open the event.

More than 10,000 scientists were expected to attend the 105th congress, a 5-day gathering at Osmania University in Hyderabad in southern India. But just 12 days before its 3 January start, organizers announced they had “indefinitely postponed” the event and that a “further course of action" will be announced. The decision was “due to certain issues [on] the campus,” the Indian Science Congress Association (ISCA) in Kolkata said in a statement.

The group pushed back, however, on reports that organizers were worried that students opposed to the Modi government’s policies would try to disrupt the proceedings, stating that the “postponement has no relation to the … Prime Minister’s visit to the event.” 

Comment by Riaz Haq on January 22, 2018 at 7:41pm

#India’s #education minister assails #Darwin's theory of #evolution, calls for #curricula overhaul to change #science #textbooks

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/01/india-s-education-minister-a...


A new front has opened in the war on science in India. On Friday, India’s minister for higher education, Satyapal Singh, took aim at the theory of evolution. Calling himself “a responsible man of science,” Singh, a chemist, suggested that Darwin’s theory is “scientifically wrong” and “needs to change” in school and university curricula. In remarks on the sidelines of a conference in Aurangabad, in central India, Singh further noted that “nobody, including our ancestors, in written or oral, have said they saw an ape turning into a man.”

Top scientists have condemned Singh’s remarks. They “seem to be aimed at politically polarizing science and scientists, and that is the real danger we must guard against,” says Raghavendra Gadagkar, immediate past president of the Indian National Science Academy and an ecologist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. Yesterday, India’s three science academies released a statement endorsed by more than 2000 scientists, declaring that “it would be a retrograde step to remove the teaching of the theory of evolution from school and college curricula or to dilute this by offering nonscientific explanations or myths.”

Singh is not the only voice in India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) espousing antiscience views. The government took heat last year over an effort to validate panchagavya, a folk remedy based on cow dung, as a cure-all, and in 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed that the world’s first plastic surgery was performed in India when the Hindu deity Ganesh was created with a human body and an elephant head. “The BJP is the fountainhead of scientific nonsense,” says opposition politician Jairam Ramesh, a mechanical engineer by training.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 12, 2018 at 4:34pm

Renaming India: Saffronization of public spaces. Erasing #Muslim Past; Hinduization of #India. #Modi #BJP #Islamophobia @AJEnglish http://aje.io/trw4n

In August 2018, India's Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) government renamed the historic Mughalsarai Junction Railway Station in the state of Uttar Pradesh after the right-wing Hindu ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, most likely because the existing name referred to the Indian Muslim Mughal dynasty.

Three years earlier, in May 2015, many street signs in New Delhi carrying Urdu/Muslim names including Aurangzeb Road, named after the sixth Mughal emperor, were painted black by Shiv Sena Hindustan, a radical Hindu organisation. Later in that year, the ruling BJP officially changed the name of the Aurangzeb Road to A P J Abdul Kalam, a pro-BJP ex-president of India. 

In April 2016, the BJP government in Haryana renamed the city of Gurgaon as Gurugram, after Guru Dronacharya, an upper caste Hindu figure from the epic Mahabharata, who is viewed as a villain by India's Dalits. 

Last month, the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh proposed to rename airports in the towns of Bareilly, Kanpur, and Agra. The proposed new names of two of the three airports have apparent Hindu overtones. Bareilly is to be renamed Nath Nagri, after the Hindu Nath sect. The Hindu politician Yogi Adityanath, the current Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, known for his brazen Islamophobia, belongs to this sect. The Agra airport, on the other hand, is to be renamed after the Hindutva ideologue Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, just like the Mughalsarai Railway Station. 

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP, also demands many other places with Muslim names, including the cities of Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, and Aurangabad, to be renamed.

Renaming places, re-writing histories
Renaming of cities, streets or landmarks is not an act exclusive to India or the BJP.

The city that was known as St Petersburg in imperial Russia was renamed Petrograd in 1914 at the start of World War I because authorities thought its original name sounded too German. In 1924, following the formation of the USSR and the death of Lenin, the name of the city was changed once again, this time to Leningrad. The city's name was reverted back to St Petersburg in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

India also renamed several cities long before the BJP took power. In 1995, it restored the names of the cities of Bombay, Bangalore, and Calcutta to their indigenous versions - Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Kolkata respectively - to emphasize its independence from Britain and reject the linguistic symbols left over from the colonial era. The names of the cities Cawnpore and Jubblepore were also changed to Kanpur and Jabalpur to reflect native spelling and pronunciation. 

READ MORE
Hindu right rewriting Indian textbooks
Although renaming has been practised widely across the world, in many cases it has been socially and politically controversial. This is because renaming is a lot more than simply changing a word on a map or a street sign. Place names are an important element of a country's cultural landscape, as they naturally document and reflect a locality's heritage and identity. Changing them is often seen as a re-writing of history. Renaming, therefore, is always a hotly debated issue.

Renaming of a place appears a lot more acceptable to the local population when it is done to erase remaining symbols of colonialism. However, when it is done solely to privilege one of the many available readings of a place's history and identity, it becomes a divisive force, helping to accentuate political, social and historic divisions within a community. 

Erasing India's Muslim heritage
The supporters of the renaming of the Aurangzeb Road in New Delhi argued that the Mughal emperor was an invader and a cruel ruler, who does not deserve to be commemorated in modern India.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 20, 2018 at 7:16am

What a story. A political worker of Hindu right wing who participated in the demolition of Babri mosque is now a Muslim and has built many mosques!

https://youtu.be/5R7suJE8Om8

Comment by Riaz Haq on February 20, 2019 at 8:12am
A 104-page report released by Human Rights Watch (#HRW) stated that at least 44 people were killed and 280 injured in more than 100 attacks by cow vigilantes across 20 #Indian states between May 2015 and December 2018. #Modi #Hindutva #India https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-20/india-cow-protection-groups-... … via @ABCNews

The crimes largely target minorities, and go unpunished due to the support of law enforcement and, HRW said, "communal rhetoric by members of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to spur a violent vigilante campaign against consumption of beef and those engaged in the cattle trade".

HRW said 36 Muslims were killed in the reported time period, and police "often stalled prosecutions of the attackers, while several BJP politicians publicly justified the attacks".

'A free pass'
Victims are also from India's Dalit (formerly known as "untouchables") and Adivasi (indigenous) communities.

Human rights activist Harsh Mander told The Guardian many of the killings were filmed, with the footage shared.

"This 'performative' aspect of the violence recalls, for me, the lynchings of African-Americans in the US as a way of showing the status to which a community has been reduced."

Many Hindus consider cows to be sacred and most states ban slaughtering cows, but the need to "save" cows and the proliferation of cow-protection groups around the country are recent phenomena.

The Guardian reported that many Hindus in Kerala and Tamil Nadu eat beef, as well as members of less-powerful castes in need of a cheap source of protein.

HRW found a 500 per cent increase in communally divisive rhetoric in speeches by politicians, 90 per cent of which were from BJP members.

About 90 per cent of the attacks were reported after the BJP's ascension to power in May 2014, and 66 per cent took place in BJP-run states.

"Calls for cow protection may have started out as a way to attract Hindu votes, but it has transformed into a free pass for mobs to violently attack and kill minority group members," said HRW's South Asia director, Meenakshi Ganguly.

"Indian authorities should stop egging on or justifying these attacks, blaming victims or protecting the culprits."

HRW said many cow-protection groups have clear ties to the BJP.

'These vigilantes get political shelter'
The report itself focused on 11 cases in four states that resulted in 14 deaths, and the Government response in each.

In almost all the cases, HRW found, police stalled the investigations, didn't follow procedure, or were complicit in the ensuing cover-ups.

"Police face political pressure to sympathise with cow protectors and do a weak investigation and let them go free," one retired senior police officer in Rajasthan told HRW.

"These vigilantes get political shelter and help."

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/02/18/india-vigilante-cow-protection-...
Comment by Riaz Haq on February 25, 2020 at 6:57pm

More than 500 scientists have asked #India's #Modi government to withdraw a call for #research to study benefits of cow dung, urine, and milk. #Hindutva #science #BJP https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/indian-scientists-decry-inf...

More than 500 scientists have asked the Indian government to withdraw a call for research proposals on the “uniqueness” of indigenous cows and the curative properties of cow urine, dung, and milk, including potential cancer treatments. In an online letter, the researchers say the call is “unscientific” and a misdirection of public money at a time when research in India is already facing a financial crunch.

Cows are considered sacred in Hinduism, and some petitioners see the research program as another effort by the Indian government, run by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to validate faith-based pseudoscience. The call does not appear to be shaped by “objective scientific inquiry,” but rather “aimed at confirming existing beliefs,” says Aniket Sule, a reader at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education who helped draft the letter. “They should prove that there is some merit in pursuing this research before throwing money at it,” Sule says.

The call for proposals, issued 14 February, is part of a larger funding program of the Department of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa and Homoeopathy, and other government agencies. It invites projects on five research themes including: “cowpathy,” the use of cow products for medicine and health, including anticancer and diabetes drugs; the use of cow products for agriculture, such as in pesticides; cow-based products like shampoo, hair oil, and floor cleaners; and research on the nutritional value of cow milk. A major aim is the “scientific investigation of uniqueness of pure Indigenous Indian cows.”

In their letter, scientists note that the call presumes “special physiological status to select breeds of only one species,” adding that “to begin a project with such presumptions is prima facie unscientific.” Money under the scheme could be “wasted to ‘investigate’ imaginary qualities derived from religious scriptures,” they said.

It’s not the first time the current government has promoted research on the cow, or more broadly, made scientific claims for unproven traditional beliefs. In 2017, the government set up a committee to vet research proposals to scientifically validate “panchgavya,” a concoction of cow milk, curd, ghee, dung, and urine held by Ayurveda texts to have curative properties. Last year, BJP Member of Parliament Sadhvi Pragya was widely criticised by oncologists when she claimed that cow urine cured her breast cancer.

The latest call comes at a time when government grants are already being delayed, scientists say, with research projects getting stalled and young researchers not receiving their monthly stipends on time. In this context, “actively canvassing proposals under such dubious scheme is even more infuriating,” their letter says.

Sule and others have appealed to the ministry to withdraw the current proposal and reframe it “to encourage open inquiry.” They have also appealed to scientists across the country to use National Science Day on 28 February to educate the general public.

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