New science awards, old political project

Image for representation.
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In 2023, the government did away with a bevy of awards conferred to scientists by the science ministries and their various institutes and departments. The decision was polarising but many, including outside the government, argued in favour of the move saying there were just too many awards and the decision-making for most of them had become so opaque as to render them a lottery.

In their place the government installed the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (RVP), a more finite set of awards in specific categories and with well-defined eligibility criteria. Most importantly, the government said that each year’s awardees would be determined by a bespoke committee led by scientists of good standing, acknowledging that it had heard scientists’ concerns about opacity and bureaucratic interference.

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Changes overnight

However, on August 7 this year, when the government announced the awards’ inaugural winners, it emerged that some scientists who had been included by the committee in the list sent to the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) had been omitted from the list publicised by the government. The question was whether anyone had modified the list between the PSA’s office and the press office, with most fingers pointing towards ministers as they have the requisite power to do so.

When journalists asked the PSA about the list, he said all the procedures stipulated on the RVP website had been followed. This alerted the people to a second oddity: the page displaying the procedures was different from the earlier page, which could be accessed using the Internet Archive service. It had been modified on the night before the PSA’s comment, to include a new rule: that the head of the RVP committee would “recommend” the final list to the Science Ministry. Until then, the head of the committee had the power to finalise the awardees.

In effect, the government had abolished the previous set of awards to institute new ones more amenable to its control. Even if this is conjecture, we cannot ignore an important characteristic of all awards: they are dignified by their laureates, not the other way around. All the scientists who had been been excluded from the final list had one commonality: they had publicly opposed some government policy or the other.

If the RVP awards had been conferred upon them, the awards — and the government — would have become distinguished in return. But the coalition led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre has in effect admitted that it is threatened by scientists who exercise their democratic rights by signing protest petitions and publishing articles in the press scrutinising policies and laws.

The government has been trying repeatedly to shut this threat once and for all — and failing. The threat is specifically the opposition to its policies and world view emanating from academia, a space the Hindutva programme has thus far failed to breach by choking funding and revenue through the Finance Ministry and provisions of the Foreign Contributions (Regulations) Act, using bad science or pseudoscience, interfering in administrative matters, and even using violence. The last count includes the police raid of the Jamia Millia Islamia in 2019; violence meted out by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad members against Jawaharlal Nehru University students in 2020; the prolonged incarceration of professors in the Elgar Parishad case; and the murders of Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar, and Govind Pansare.

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‘Alternative’ scholarship

This said, nothing illustrates the ham-fisted character of the government’s attempts, which err fundamentally by failing to understand the power of good scholarship and the spirit of studentship, as clearly as the sites of ‘alternative’ scholarship it has set up. The purpose of these sites appears to be to realise or sustain the plausibility of the claims of the Hindutva political project. One in particular is that the Aryans were natives of the subcontinent. This is contrary to what scientists have been finding: that the Aryans were immigrants from West Asia and that the Indus Valley Civilisation and other civilisational settlements in the region preceded their arrival.

In 2021, an ‘Indian Knowledge Systems Centre’ at IIT Kharagpur published a “Vedic calendar” full of fanciful attempts to reinterpret symbols found at Indus Valley sites. Thus, the famous Pashupati seal found in Mohenjo-Daro became a “Vedic-Puranic Shiva”. In 2022, IIT Kanpur said Sri Sri Ravishankar would induct new students that year. A few days later the University Grants Commission asked universities to organise lectures on Constitution Day touting India had a democratic government in its Vedic era. Last year, the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi asked its staff to attend talks about “medical science and Indian scriptures”; separately, the Indian Space Research Organisation chairman, S. Somanath, called Sanskrit a language well-suited for machine learning. IIT Mandi director Laxmidhar Behera has blamed meat-eating for landslides.

Having failed at political capture from the outside, the BJP has been taking the inside-out route. The RVP awards seem like an attempt to bring scholars in line by hijacking their reward mechanisms. In a few years, stewardship of the awarding process is to be transferred to the Anusandhan National Research Foundation, which will also regulate all research and development activities in the country. Yet one hopes that scholars’ continued willingness to speak up against peculiarities in the awards’ selection process will help undo the government’s control impulse.

mukunth.v@thehindu.co.in