Bowel cleanse for better DNA: the nonsense science of Modi’s India

Krishnan identifies himself as a senior scientist with the World Community Service Centre, a society that works towards world peace “through individual peace”, located in Tamil Nadu. It is unclear how a society working for world peace was associated with the Indian Science Congress. The venue of the congress was also intriguing – the Lovely Professional University is a private university of small repute, known for being set up by a family that had a successful sweets business whose founder never went to school himself.

At a children’s session at the same congress, G. Nageswara Rao, a professor of inorganic chemistry, said the 100 Kaurava siblings mentioned in the Indian epic Mahabharata were born using stem-cell technology. It was initially thought Rao might have told stories around science because he was addressing children, but when he was later contacted by the press to clarify, he said he considered the Mahabharata and the Ramayana – an epic poem – to be history and not simply legends.

With his stem-cell story, Rao looped back to an address made by Modi in 2014, months after he was elected to power in a landslide victory. Speaking to doctors, Modi said the birth of Karna, a great warrior in the Mahabharata , was an example of stem-cell technology in the age of the epic; as legend has it, Karna was born to his mother out of wedlock. At the same event, the prime minister said the Hindu god Ganesha, who is depicted with an elephant’s trunk in place of his nose, was an example of plastic surgery in ancient India.

From 2014 to 2019, the Modi government has shown remarkable consistency in one subject: its continual delivery of nonsense science. In September 2014, Modi made statements sceptical of climate change: “Climate change? Is this terminology correct? The reality is that in our family, some people are old … They say this time the weather is colder. And people’s ability to bear cold becomes less.”