Bharat Bhushan: Where ignorance is bliss, 'Tis folly to be wise? On institutional promotion of ignorance in India
Arguing against
ignorance in his politically trenchant manner, the irrepressible Justice
(Retd.) Markandeya Katju recently tweeted: “Children must be taken to the Zoo
to ensure that when they grow up they don’t confuse a Donkey with a Lion.” Growing up is the
process of escaping ignorance. India, however, increasingly seems to be a
nation where ignorance continues well past adulthood and is even celebrated. Too
much education, it is being suggested, can blind one to recognising real social
and economic change.
Selling the
government’s ambitions to make India a 5-trillion dollar economy to
participants at a Board of Trade, Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal warned his audience that they must not be
deceived by figures and data to the contrary. His clinching argument was “Maths
did not help Einstein to discover gravity.” Though he eventually apologised for
confusing Einstein with Newton, he did not regret his public contempt for
“maths” and “calculations” of economic growth as means of ascertaining the
health of the economy.
Other worthies too
have been quite at ease making ignorant pronouncements and taking a dig at what
they perceive as too much intellectualism. The Prime Minister
remains unabashed about his boo-boos on a variety of subjects. In an
interaction with school students when asked about his views on climate change,
he claimed that climate does not change, it’s just that with age people become
more sensitive to changes in temperature.
More recently he made some more
enthusiastic statements about mathematics than Minister Piyush Goel. On a visit
to Canada he wondered how (a+b)² resulted in an “extra” 2ab in addition to
a²+b². His comments on how flying under cover of clouds would help Indian Air
Force fighter planes to avoid being detected by Pakistan’s radars are surely
too recent to be forgotten. His ministers are
known to have denied human evolution and claim that the Laws of Motion had been
codified in ancient Indian mantras much before Newton. His former junior
education minister Satyapal Yadav once asked if humans had indeed evolved from
apes why had “our ancestors not mentioned this anywhere?”
The ruling party’s MP
from Bhopal, the saffron-robed Sadhvi Pragya claimed that it was a hex she had
put on police officer Hemant Karkare that brought about his death in a
terrorist shoot-out in Mumbai. Earlier she explained to a TV channel how
stroking the hair against its direction of growth on a cow’s back was a sure
cure for hypertension and claimed that her breast cancer was cured by ingesting
cow urine. Another BJP MP Shankarbhai Vegad from Gujarat told Parliament
that “cancer becomes cancel” by use of cow dung and cow urine which he said
were “a 100 per cent cure for cancer”. Some activists recently got frogs
‘married’ to ensure rains in Madhya Pradesh. The frogs were later ‘divorced’ to
halt the deluge that followed.
These and other abundant
examples of ignorance are not to be sniggered at. Such ignorance promotes
anti-intellectualism as a virtue when it gets an institutional stamp.
Anti-intellectualism is a useful tool for the Bharatiya Janata Party, (BJP) to
counter the Rationalist arguments of its critics. Not only are some of
the best Indian universities under attack but atavistic beliefs are being
deliberately promoted by state funding of research. The Indian Council of
Medical Research, the nation’s top funding body for biomedical research, is
supporting a project to study the efficacy of an ancient Rig Vedic chant, the
Mahamrityunjay Mantra (literally, the chant to defy death) in treating patients
with severe traumatic brain injury at New Delhi’s state-run Ram Manohar Lohia
Hospital.
In 2017 the Madhya Pradesh government’s Mahrishi Patanjali Sanskrit
Sansthan set up an “Astro-OPD consultancy centre” where astrologers would help
in diagnosing illnesses. The Junagadh
Agricultural University (JAU) in the prime minister’s home state of Gujarat,
has an ongoing research project to extract gold from cow urine. Indeed, they
claim to have done so already. The Archaeological Survey of India has “found”
the mythical River Saraswati in several sites in India. It is time to ask why
public figures and institutions are promoting unscientific beliefs at citizens’
expense.
When people with
little education become prominent in public life, they mistakenly assess their
cognitive abilities to be greater than they are. Psychologists call it the
Dunning-Kruger effect. Research has established that less intelligent people
are usually much more confident than their relatively more intelligent
counterparts who tend to be circumspect about the extent of their knowledge.
Inadequate education leads successful people to proclaim their ignorance
publicly and with aplomb.
However, the unashamed
display of anti-intellectualism by the new political elite cannot be entirely
explained by lack of education. The BJP government’s
institutional promotion of ignorance is deeply linked to its politics. If those
who control the State want to motivate people through fear and communal hatred,
to win their confidence by simplistic explanations of social and political
phenomena and to make state and non-state violence acceptable, then they must
promote ignorance and non-reason. Under the BJP, the promotion of ignorance
helps in the exaltation of communalism, social violence, over-zealous
patriotism and its peculiar brand of nationalism.
For those whose
politics is based on these public attributes, the promotion of an
anti-intellectual society is a necessity. Anti-intellectualism facilitates
emotional manipulation of the governed. The normalisation of ignorance on a
social scale can thus become an effective tool of governance. The important question
is whether we are in the process of abandoning critical thinking as a societal
value? In the name of education, will people accept research on cow dung, the
birth place of Gods and the historicity of mythical subjects? If people do not
realise that anti-intellectualism comes at a hefty price, it could be a setback
to India’s ambitions of greatness. Hindutva’s ideologues cannot make India
“Vishwa Guru (Teacher of the World)” by celebrating ignorance.
