I strongly disagree with some criticism that has emerged on Twitter against the new JNU vice-chancellor Santishree Pandit. The object of criticism is a statement that Pandit has apparently drafted and in which she states, broadly, what she considers to be her mandate. In response, BJP MP Varun Gandhi wrote:
This press release from the new JNU VC is an exhibition of illiteracy,littered with grammatical mistakes (would strive vs will strive;students friendly vs student-friendly;excellences vs excellence).Such mediocre appointments serve to damage our human capital & our youth’s future pic.twitter.com/tSanmy3VfR
Here are screenshots of tweets by two other people, both with a not-insubstantial number of followers on Twitter:
At the outset, while Pandit deserves the criticism that has come her way for her use of abusive language on Twitter against the country’s students and farmers, using the quality of the English language in the statement to deride her is unfair. I have two reasons.
First, listen to this talk (also embedded below) Pandit delivered in 2015: her diction is much better than her new statement would suggest. It suggests strongly that someone else wrote the statement and that Pandit simply signed off on it, as a formality.
Second, even if we assumed Pandit wrote the statement, or that the criticism of Varun Gandhi and others were really to be directed at the statement’s real author…
English is a difficult language to learn and use. Its grammar often has a mind of its own – typically in the form of what linguist Noam Chomsky has called opaque structures: turns of phrase that allow us to deduce nothing about their origins based on their composition itself (“trip the light fantastic” comes to mind; it means, of all things, to dance in a nimble way.)
There are word and sentence constructions in English into which someone who doesn’t read, write and speak the language regularly is unlikely to ever stumble. As such, the language is part deduction and part memorisation (sort of like biology), and unless someone claims to wish to succeed Mary Norris or Mary Beard, or wishes to draft law, criticising a person’s flawed use of the English language can only amount to a criticism of their lack of access to English-speaking habits, circles, etc., and in turn a criticism of either their inability or their unwillingness to have this access. And this is not a sin. In fact, I suspect that the statement’s author is more fluent in a different language than in English and that if that person had penned their statement in that language, it would have been much less grammatically iffy.
One may contend that the critics expect better from the vice-chancellor of JNU. What is this ‘better’? At the risk of affirming the consequent, let’s flip the argument such that it becomes: “A vice-chancellor of JNU must be able to string two sentences together in a grammatically correct way.” Why must this requirement be met?
There is a presumption here, however slight, that the goodness of Pandit’s knowledge of the English language is an indication of her being unfit for the job, or more generally that it could be a proxy for the many, many things that count towards literacy, not to mention her prowess as a teacher and her familiarity with the subject matter. (Before her appointment, Pandit was a professor of political science at the Savitribhai Phule Pune University.)
If the requirement must be met nonetheless, should we subject all future vice-chancellors to this ‘test’, to have them demonstrate their literacy? Should we also extend these tests to the heads of other important institutions – such as, say, S. Somanath of ISRO or health minister Mansukh Mandaviya? Pandit works at a university where many classes are conducted in English and where English is also an important language of administration – but this is easily true of ISRO and the health ministry as well. Most extant knowledge of space science, engineering studies, medical science and Indian public administration exist in English.
Attacking Pandit’s grammar could in effect set up a requirement for vice-chancellorship that could easily say nothing at all about the appointee’s competency. Pandit’s statement expresses itself without confusion and, given the context, its real author likely didn’t have and/or enlist the assistance of other people who could fix the grammatical mistakes (it’s entirely possible they didn’t check for grammatical mistakes and/or that they believed that they wouldn’t matter to her intended readers).
In fact, I appreciate that the statement dispenses with appearances and seems to come straight from Pandit’s or another author’s desk without having visited a PR unit in between. If such a PR team had helped draft the statement and we all hadn’t discovered today that her English isn’t perfect, we wouldn’t have lost any bit of the information we actually need to scrutinise her Twitter comments and her vice-chancellorship – as much as we haven’t gained anything today by knowing that Pandit is okay with using “would” instead of “will”.
Ultimately, the only criticism that makes sense here, assuming someone else did draft Pandit’s statement, and if that person’s job is to draft statements, then a) they should do better, and b) Pandit should read public statements before signing them. If she doesn’t, that signals another kind of problem.
Featured image: Santishree Pandit delivering her 2015 talk. Source: YouTube.
Reuters published a very interesting report on February 2, entitled ‘Exclusive-In heated meeting, India seeks tougher action from U.S. tech giants on fake news’. Excerpt:
Indian officials have held heated discussions with Google, Twitter and Facebook for not proactively removing what they described as fake news on their platforms, sources told Reuters, the government’s latest altercation with Big Tech.
The officials, from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B), strongly criticised the companies and said their inaction on fake news was forcing the Indian government to order content takedowns, which in turn drew international criticism that authorities were suppressing free expression, two sources said.
I’d have thought any good-faith attempt to crack down on fake news on social media and news-aggregation platforms will inevitably crack down on right-wing content generation enterprises, including the BJP’s bot/troll armies, its ministers and ‘news’ outlets like The Daily Guardian, OpIndia, etc. So BJP government officials getting worked up over this issue is insightful: contrary to what I thought was usually implied, the government honestly believes news that is at odds with its narratives is fake – or, knowing that Google, Facebook and Twitter will push back, this is the government’s ploy to be seen to be taking fake news on these platforms seriously without eventually having to do anything about it.
The government has an able collaborator in Google at least, whose executives had a solution for the government officials’ problem: reduce transparency.
Executives from Google told the I&B officials that one way to resolve that was for the ministry to avoid making takedown decisions public. The firms could work with the government and act on the alleged fake content, which could be a win-win for both sides, Google said, according to one of the sources.
Interestingly again, according to Reuters, officials “summarily rejected” this idea because the “takedowns also publicise how the companies weren’t doing enough to tackle fake news on their own”. This “heated exchange” sounds like the real win-win to me: the party comes off looking like a) it’s opposed to fake news and b) its social-media legions aren’t engaged in manufacturing fake news, while these ‘tech giants’ don’t alienate the political right and protect their profits.
Does the information shared in preprints typically withstand the scrutiny of peer review, or are conclusions likely to change in the version of record? We assessed preprints from bioRxiv and medRxiv that had been posted and subsequently published in a journal through April 30, 2020, representing the initial phase of the pandemic response. We utilised a combination of automatic and manual annotations to quantify how an article changed between the preprinted and published version. We found that the total number of figure panels and tables changed little between preprint and published articles. Moreover, the conclusions of 7.2% of non-COVID-19-related and 17.2% of COVID-19-related abstracts undergo a discrete change by the time of publication, but the majority of these changes do not qualitatively change the conclusions of the paper.
Later: “A major concern with expedited publishing is that it may impede the rigour of the peer review process.”
So far, according to this and one other paper published by PLOS Biology, it seems reasonable to ask not whether preprints are reliable but what peer-review brings to the table. (By this I mean the conventional/legacy variety of closed pre-publication review).
To the uninitiated: paralleling the growing popularity and usefulness of open-access publishing, particularly in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, some “selective” journals – to use wording from the PLOS Biology paper – and their hordes of scientist-supporters have sought to stress the importance of peer-review in language both familiar and based on an increasingly outdated outlook: that peer-review is important to prevent misinformation. I’ve found a subset of this argument, that peer-review is important for papers whose findings could save/end lives, to be more reasonable, and the rest just unreasonable and self-serving.
Funnily enough, two famously “selective” journals, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, retracted two papers related to COVID-19 care in the thick of the pandemic – invalidating their broader argument in favour of peer-review as well as the efficiency of their own peer-review processes vis-à-vis the subset argument.
Arguments in favour of peer-review are self-serving because it has more efficient, more transparent and more workable alternatives, yet many journals have failed to adopt them, and have instead used this repeatedly invalidated mode of reviewing papers to maintain their opaque style of functioning, which in turn – and together with the purported cost of printing papers on physical paper – they use to justify the exorbitant prices they charge readers (here’s one ludicrous example).
For example, one alternative is pre-publication peer-review, in which scientists upload their paper to a preprint server, like arXiv, bioRxiv or medRxiv, and share the link with their peers and, say, on social media platforms. There, independent experts review the paper’s contents and share their comments. The paper’s authors can incorporate the necessary changes, with credit, as separate versions of the same paper on the server.
Further, and unlike ‘conventional’ journals’ laughable expectation of journalists to write about the papers they publish without fear of being wrong, journalists subject preprint papers to the same treatment that is due the average peer-reviewed paper as well: with reasonable and courteous scepticism, and to qualify its claims and findings with comments from independent experts – with an added caveat, though I personally think it unnecessary, that their subject is a preprint paper.
(Some of you might remember that in 2018, Tom Sheldon argued in a Nature News & Views article that peer-review facilitates good journalism. I haven’t come across an argument more objectionable in favour of conventional peer-review.)
However, making this mode of reviewing and publishing more acceptable has been very hard, especially for the demand to repeatedly push back against scientists whose academic reputation depends on having published and being able to publish in “selective” journals and the scientometric culture they uphold, and their hollow arguments about the virtues of conventional, opaque peer-review. (Making peer-review transparent could also help deal with reviewers who use the opportunity anonymity affords them to be sexist and racist.)
But with the two new PLOS Biology papers, we have an opportunity to flip these scientists’ and journals’ demand that preprint papers ‘prove’ or ‘improve’ themselves around to ask what the legacy modes bring to the table. From the abstract of the second paper (emphasis added):
We sought to compare the and contrast linguistic features within bioRxiv preprints to published biomedical test as a while as this is an excellent opportunity to examine how peer review changes these documents. The most prevalent features that changed appear to be associated with typesetting and mentions of supporting information sections or additional files. In addition to text comparison, we created document embeddings derived from a preprint-trained word2vec model. We found that these embeddings are able to parse out different scientific approaches and concepts, link unannotated preprint-peer-reviewed article pairs, and identify journals that publish linguistically similar papers to a given preprint. We also used these embeddings to examine factors associated with the time elapsed between the posting of a first preprint and the appearance of a peer-reviewed publication. We found that preprints with more versions posted and more textual changes took longer to publish.
It seems to me to be reasonable to ask about the rigour to which supporters of conventional peer-review have staked claim when few papers appear to benefit from it. The process may be justified in those few cases where a paper is corrected in a significant way, and that it may be difficult to identify those papers without peer-review – but pre-publication peer-review has an equal chance of identifying the same errors (esp. if we increase the discoverability of preprints the way journal editors identify eminent experts in the same field to review papers, instead of relying solely on social-media interactions that less internet-savvy scientists may not be able to initiate).
In addition, it appears that in most cases in which preprints were uploaded to bioRxiv first and were then peer-reviewed and published by a journal, the papers’ authors clearly didn’t submit papers that required significant quality improvements – certainly not to the extent to which conventional peer-review’s supporters have alluded to in an effort to make such review necessary.
So, why must conventional peer-review, in the broader sense, persist?
Plagiarism is a tricky issue. If it’s straightforward to you, ask yourself if you’re assuming that the plagiariser (plagiarist?) is fluent in reading and writing, but especially writing, English. The answer’s probably ‘yes’. This is because for someone entering into an English-using universe for the first time, certain turns of phrase and certain ways to articulate complicated concepts stick with you the first time you read them, and when the time comes for you to spell out the same ideas and concepts, you passively, inadvertently recall them and reuse them. You don’t think – at least at first – that they’re someone else’s words, more so if you haven’t been taught, for no fault of yours, what academic plagiarism is and/or that it’s bad.
This is also why there’s a hierarchy of plagiarism. For example, if you’re writing a scientific paper and you copy another paper’s results, that’s worse than if you copy verbatim the explanation of a certain well-known idea. This is why former University Grants Commission chairman Praveen Chaddah wrote in 2014:
There are worse offences than text plagiarism — such as taking credit for someone else’s research ideas and lifting their results. These are harder to detect than copy-and-pasted text, so receive less attention. This should change. To help, academic journals could, for instance, change the ways in which they police and deal with such cases.
But if you’re fluent with writing English, if you know what plagiarism and plagiarise anyway (without seeking resources to help you beat its temptation), and/or if you’re stealing someone else’s idea and calling it your own, you deserve the flak and (proportionate) sanctions coming your way. In this context, a new Retraction Watch article by David Sanders makes for interesting reading. According to Sanders, in 2018, he wrote to the editors of a journal that had published a paper in 2011 with lots of plagiarised text. After a back-and-forth, the editors told Sanders they’d look into it. He asked them again in 2019 and May 2021 and received the same reply on both occasions. Then on July 26 the journal published a correction to the 2011 article. Sanders wasn’t happy and wrote back to the editors, one of whom replied thus:
Thank you for your email. We went through this case again, and discussed whether we may have made the wrong decision. We did follow the COPE guidelines step by step and used several case studies for further information. This process confirmed that an article should be retracted when it is misleading for the reader, either because the information within is incorrect, or when an author induces the reader to think that the data presented is his own. As this is a Review, copied from other Reviews, the information within does not per se mislead the reader, as the primary literature is still properly cited. We agree that this Review was not written in a desirable way, and that the authors plagiarised a large amount of text, but according to the guidelines the literature must be considered from the point of view of the reader, and retractions should not be used as a tool to punish authors. We therefore concluded that a corrigendum was the best way forward. Hence, we confirm our decision on this case.
Thank you again for flagging this case in the first place, which allowed us to correct the record and gain deeper insights into publishing ethics, even though this led to a solution we do not necessarily like.
Sanders wasn’t happy: he wrote on Retraction Watch that “the logic of [the editor’s] message is troubling. The authors engaged in what is defined by COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics) as ‘Major Plagiarism’ for which the prescribed action is retraction of the published article and contacting the institution of the authors. And yet the journal did not retract.” The COPE guidelines summarise the differences between minor and major plagiarism this way:
Not being fluent in English could render the decisions made using this table less than fair, for example because an author could plagiarise several paragraphs but honestly have no intention to deceive – simply because they didn’t think they needed to be that careful. I know this might sound laughable to a scientist operating in the US or Europe, out of a better-run, better-organised and better-funded institute, and who has been properly in the ins and outs of academic ethics. But it’s true: the bulk of India’s scientists work outside the IITs, IISERs, DAE/DBT/DST-funded institutes and the more progressive private universities (although only one – Ashoka – comes to mind). Their teachers before them worked in the same resource-constrained environments, and for most of whom the purpose of scientific work wasn’t science as much as an income. Most of them probably never used plagiarism-checking tools either, at least not until they got into trouble one time and then found out about such things.
I myself found out about the latter in an interesting way – when I reported that Appa Rao Podile, the former vice-chancellor of the University of Hyderabad, had plagiarised in some of his papers, around the time students at the university were protesting the university’s response to the death of Rohith Vemula. When I emailed Podile for his response, he told me he would like my help with the tools with which he could spot plagiarism. I thought he was joking, but after a series of unofficial enquiries over the next year or so, I learnt that plagiarism-checking software was not at all the norm, even if solutions like Copyscape were relatively cheap, in state-funded colleges and second-tier universities around the country. I had no reason to leave Podile off the hook – but not because he hadn’t used plagiarism-checking software but because he was a vice-chancellor of a major university and had to have done better than claim ignorance.
(I also highly recommend this November 2019 article in The Point, asking whether plagiarism is wrong.)
According to Sanders, the editor who replied didn’t retract the paper because he thought it wasn’t ‘major plagiarism’, according to COPE – whereas Sanders thought it was. The editor appears to have reasoned his way out of the allegation, in the editor’s view at least, by saying that the material printed in the paper wasn’t misleading because it had been copied from non-misleading original material and that the supposedly lesser issue was that while it had been cited, it hadn’t been syntactically attributed as such (placed between double quotes, for example). The issue for Sanders, with whom I agree here, is that the authors had copied the material and presented it in a way that indicated they were its original creators. The lengths to which journal editors can go to avoid retracting papers, and therefore protect their journal’s reputation, ranking or whatever, is astounding. I also agree with Sanders when he says that by refusing to retract the article, the editors are practically encouraging misconduct.
I’d like to go a step further and ask: when journal editors think like this, where does that leave Indian scientists of the sort I’ve described above – who are likely to do better with the right help and guidance? In 2018, Rashmi Raniwala and Sudhir Raniwala wrote in The Wire Science that the term ‘predatory’, in ‘predatory journals’, was a misnomer:
… it is incorrect to call them ‘predatory’ journals because the term predatory suggests that there is a predator and a victim. The academicians who publish in these journals are not victims; most often, they are self-serving participants. The measure of success is the number of articles received by these journals. The journals provide a space to those who wanted easy credit. And a large number of us wanted this easy credit because we were, to begin with, not suitable for the academic profession and were there for the job. In essence, these journals could not have succeeded without an active participation and the connivance of some of us.
It was a good article at the time, especially in the immediate context of the Raniwalas’ fight to have known defaulters suitably punished. There are many bad-faith actors in the Indian scientific community and what the Raniwalas write about applies to them without reservation (ref. the cases of Chandra Krishnamurthy, R.A. Mashelkar, Deepak Pental, B.S. Rajput, V. Ramakrishnan, C.N.R. Rao, etc.). But I’m also confident enough to say now that predatory journals exist, typified by editors who place the journal before the authors of the articles that constitute it, who won’t make good-faith efforts to catch and correct mistakes at the time they’re pointed out. It’s marginally more disappointing that the editor who replied to Sanders replied at all; most don’t, as Elisabeth Bik has repeatedly reminded us. He bothered enough to engage – but not enough to give a real damn.
Cash payments for poor mothers increased brain function in babies, a study found, with potential implications for U.S. safety net policy. https://t.co/3rd06k0eih
First, it’s also a bad discovery (note: there’s a difference between right/wrong and good/bad). It is useful to found specific interventions on scientific findings – such as that providing pregnant women with iron supplements in a certain window of the pregnancy could reduce the risk of anaemia by X%. However, that the state should provide iron supplements to pregnant women belonging to certain socio-economic groups across the country shouldn’t be founded on scientific findings. Such welfarist schemes should be based on the implicit virtues of social welfare itself. In the case of the new study: the US government should continue with cash payments for poor mothers irrespective of their babies’ learning outcomes. The programme can’t stop if any of their babies are slow learners.
Second, I think the deeper problem in this example lies with the context in which the study’s findings could be useful. Scientists and economists have the liberty to study what they will, as well as report what they find (see third point). But consider a scenario in which lawmakers are presented with two policies, both rooted in the same ideologies and both presenting equally workable solutions to a persistent societal issue. Only one, however, has the results of a scientific study to back up its ability to achieve its outcomes (let’s call this ‘Policy A’). Which one will the lawmakers pick to fund?
Note here that this isn’t a straightforward negotiation between the lawmakers’ collective sensibilities and the quality of the study. The decision will also be influenced by the framework of accountability and justification within which the lawmakers operate. For example, those in small, progressive nations like Finland or New Zealand, where the general scientific literacy is high enough to recognise the ills of scientism, may have the liberty to set the study aside and then decide – but those in India, a large and nationalist nation with generally low scientific literacy, are likelier than not to construe the very availability of scientific backing, of any quality, to mean Policy A is better.
This is how studies like the one above could become a problem: by establishing a pseudo-privilege for policies that have ‘scientific findings’ to back up their promises. It also creates a rationalisation of the Republican Party’s view that by handing out “unconditional aid”, the state will discourage the recipients from working. While the Republicans’ contention is speculative in principle, in policy and, just to be comprehensive, in science, scientific studies that find the opposite play nicely into their hands – even in as straightforward a case as that of poor mothers. As the New York Times article itself writes:
Another researcher, Charles A. Nelson III of Harvard, reacted more cautiously, noting the full effect of the payments — $333 a month — would not be clear until the children took cognitive tests. While the brain patterns documented in the study are often associated with higher cognitive skills, he said, that is not always the case.
“It’s potentially a groundbreaking study,” said Dr. Nelson, who served as a consultant to the study. “If I was a policymaker, I’d pay attention to this, but it would be premature of me to pass a bill that gives every family $300 a month.”
A temporary federal program of near-universal children’s subsidies — up to $300 a month per child through an expanded child tax credit — expired this month after Mr. Biden failed to unite Democrats behind a large social policy bill that would have extended it. Most Republicans oppose the monthly grants, citing the cost and warning that unconditional aid, which they describe as welfare, discourages parents from working.
Sharing some of those concerns, Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, effectively blocked the Biden plan, though he has suggested that he might support payments limited to families of modest means and those with jobs. The payments in the research project, called Baby’s First Years, were provided regardless of whether the parents worked.
Third, and in continuation, it’s ridiculous to attach the approval for policies whose principles are clear and sound to the quality of data originating from scientific studies, which in turn depends on the quality of theoretical and experimental instruments scientists have at their disposal (“We hypothesized that infants in the high-cash gift group would have greater EEG power in the mid- to high-frequency bands and reduced power in a low-frequency band compared with infants in the low-cash gift group.”). And let’s not forget, on scientists coming along in time to ask the right questions.
Fourth, do scientists and economists really have the liberty to study and report what they will? There are two ways to slice this. 1: To clarify the limited context in which this question is worth considering – not at all in almost all cases, and only when a study uncovers the scientific basis for something that isn’t well-served by such a basis. This principle is recursive: it should preclude the need for a scientific study of whether support for certain policies has been set back by the presence or absence of scientific studies. 2: where does the demand for these studies originate? Clearly someone somewhere thought, “Do we know the policy’s effects in the population?” Science can provide quick answers in some cases but not in others, and in the latter, it should be prevented from creating the impression that the absence of evidence is the evidence of absence.
Who bears that responsibility? I believe that has fallen on the shoulders of politicians, social scientists, science communicators and exponents of the humanities alone for too long; scientists also need to exercise the corresponding restraint, and refrain from conducting studies in which they don’t specify the precise context (and not just that limited to science) in which their findings are valid, if at all. In the current case, NYT called the study’s findings “modest” – that the “researchers likened them in statistical magnitude to moving to the 75th position in a line of 100 from the 81st”. Modest results are also results, sure, but as we have come to expect with COVID-19 research, don’t conduct poor studies – and by extension don’t conduct studies of a social-science concept in a scientific way and expect it to be useful.
I’m partway through Renny Thomas’s new book, Science and Religion in India: Beyond Disenchantment. Its description on the Routledge page reads:
This book provides an in-depth ethnographic study of science and religion in the context of South Asia, giving voice to Indian scientists and shedding valuable light on their engagement with religion. Drawing on biographical, autobiographical, historical, and ethnographic material, the volume focuses on scientists’ religious life and practices, and the variety of ways in which they express them. Renny Thomas challenges the idea that science and religion in India are naturally connected and argues that the discussion has to go beyond binary models of ‘conflict’ and ‘complementarity’. By complicating the understanding of science and religion in India, the book engages with new ways of looking at these categories.
To be fair to Renny as well as to prospective readers, I’m hardly familiar with scholarship in this area of study and in no position to be able to confidently critique the book’s arguments. I’m reading it to learn. With this caveat out of the way…
I’ve been somewhat familiar with Renny’s work and my expectation of his new book to be informative and insightful has been more than met. I like two things in particular based on the approximately 40% I’ve read so far (and not necessarily from the beginning). First, Science and Religion quotes scientists with whom Renny spoke to glean insights generously. A very wise man told me recently that in most cases, it’s possible to get the gist of (non-fiction) books written by research scholars and focusing on their areas of work just by reading the introductory chapter. I think this book may be the exception that makes the rule for me. On occasion Renny also quotes from books by other scientists and scholars to make his point, which I say to imply that for readers like me, who are interested in but haven’t had the chance to formally study these topics, Science and Religion can be a sort of introductory text as well.
For example, in one place, Renny quotes some 150 words from Raja Ramanna’s autobiography, where the latter – a distinguished physicist and one of the more prominent endorsers of the famous 1981 ‘statement on scientific temper’ – recalls in spirited fashion his visit to Gangotri. The passage reminded me of an article by American historian of science Daniel Sarewitz published many years ago, in which he described his experience of walking through the Angkor Wat temple complex in Cambodia. I like to credit Sarewitz’s non-academic articles for getting me interested in the sociology of science, especially critiques of science as a “secularising medium”, to use Renny’s words, but I have also been guilty of having entered this space of thought and writing through accounts of spiritual experiences written by scientists from countries other than India. But now, thanks to Science and Religion, I have the beginnings of a resolution.
Second, the book’s language is extremely readable: undergraduate students who are enthusiastic about science should be able to read it for pleasure (and I hope students of science and engineering do). I myself was interested in reading it because I’ve wanted, and still want, to understand what goes on in the minds of people like ISRO chairman K. Sivan when they insist on visiting Tirupati before every major rocket launch. And Renny clarifies his awareness of these basic curiosities early in the book:
… scientists continue to be the ‘special’ folk in India. It is this image of ‘special’ folk and science’s alleged relationship with ‘objectivity’ which makes people uneasy when scientists go to temple, engage in prayer, and openly declare their allegiance to religious beliefs. The dominance and power of science and its status as a superior epistemology is part of the popular imagination. The continuing media discussion on ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) scientists when they offer prayer before any mission is an example.
Renny also clarifies the religious and caste composition of his interlocutors at the outset as well as dedicates a chapter to discussing the ways in which caste and religious identities present themselves in laboratory settings, and the ways in which they’re acknowledged and dismissed – but mostly dismissed. An awareness of caste and religion is also important to understand the Sivan question, according to Science and Religion. Nearly midway through the book, Renny discusses a “strategic adjustment” among scientists that allows them to practice science and believe in gods “without revealing the apparent contradictions between the two”. Here, one scientist identifies one of the origins of religious belief in an individual to be their “cultural upbringing”; but later in the book, in conversations with Brahmin scientists (and partly in the context of an implicit belief that the practice of science is vouchsafed for Brahmins in India), Renny reveals that they don’t distinguish between cultural and religious practices. For example, scientists who claim to be staunch atheists are also strict vegetarians, don the ‘holy thread’ and, most tellingly for me, insist on getting their sons and daughters married off to people belonging to the same caste.
They argued that they visited temples and pilgrimage centres not for worship but out of an architectural and aesthetic interest, to marvel at the architectural beauty. As Indians, they are proud of these historical places and pilgrimage centres. They happily invite their guests from other countries to these places with a sense of pride and historicity. Some of the atheist scientists I spoke to informed me that they would offer puja and seek darshan while visiting the temples and historically relevant pilgrimage places, especially when they go with their family; “to make them happy.” They argued that they wouldn’t question the religious beliefs and practices of others and professed that it was a personal choice to be religious or non-religious. They also felt that religion and belief in God provided psychological succor to believers in their hardships and one should not oppose them. Many of the atheist scientists think that festivals such as Diwali or Ayudha Puja are cultural events.
In their worldview, the distinction between religion and culture has dissolved – and which clearly emphasises the importance of considering the placedness of science just as much as we consider the placedness of religion. By way of example, Science and Religion finds both religion and science at work in laboratories, but en route it also discovers that to do science in certain parts of India – but especially South India, where many of the scientists in his book are located – is to do science in a particular milieu distorted by caste: here, the “lifeworld” is to Brahmins as water is to fish. Perhaps this is how Sivan thinks, too,although he is likely to be performing the subsequent rituals more passively, and deliberately and in self-interest, assuming he seeks his sense of his social standing based on and his deservingness of social support from the wider community of fellow Brahmins: that we must pray and make some offerings to god because that’s how we always did it growing up.
At least, these are my preliminary thoughts. I’m looking forward to finishing Science and Religion this month (I’m a slow reader) and looking forward to learning more in the process.
The Print has just published a bizarre article about Niraj Bishnoi, the alleged “mastermind” (whatever that means) of the ‘Bulli Bai’ app. I know nothing about Niraj Bishnoi; the article’s problem is that it has reproduced the Delhi police’s profile of Bishnoi and indications in that profile, provided by police personnel, of Bishnoi’s alleged deviancy sans any qualification. I’ve reproduced relevant portions of the article below (with a left-indent), and my annotations are intercalated.
But first, according to Sukanya Shantha, my colleague at The Wire: “These stories are quite common. They mean nothing in court. Defence comes up with such BS everytime before arguing on quantum of punishment. We saw similar stuff during Shakti Mills, and Delhi rape too. Even Ajmal Kasab was called ‘mentally deranged’ by his lawyer.” While such claims like those by defence lawyers may be common, I don’t understand why the media – and especially independent media – has to amplify them without sparing a thought for what they ultimately imply.
Suspected ‘Bulli Bai’ app creator, 20-year-old Niraj Bisnoi had 153 porn film downloads and lewd, sexual content in his laptop, sources in the Delhi Police claimed Thursday. The evidence in his laptop suggest Bisnoi is a “porn addict” and “has abnormal desires towards elderly Muslim women”, the sources added.
This para – the first – sets the tone for what you can expect from the rest of the article. And The Print considers the most important point vis-à-vis this article to be that Niraj Bishnoi had 153 pornographic films on his laptop, that he is a “porn addict” – presumably the Delhi police’s words – and that he harboured “abnormal” desires “towards elderly Muslim women”. We may never know how either the police or the author of the article leaped from pornography and fantasies to an implied justification for Niraj Bishnoi’s alleged crimes.
A 2015 article in Psychology Today did a good job summarising what we knew about pornography until then, and I think the conclusions still stand: a) there’s both good and bad to viewing pornography, b) the bad that is often attributed anecdotally to pornography is grossly at odds with the effects that psychologists have found; and c) even so, causal links between consuming pornography and holding specific beliefs or committing specific acts don’t yet exist. Against this context, what The Print has found fit to print is an unfounded opinion of the Delhi police and not a cause by any stretch.
Also, echoing Sukanya Shantha’s point, why is the Delhi police rising to Niraj Bishnoi’s defence, instead of Bishnoi’s lawyers? (Assuming of course that this is a defence…)
According to sources in Delhi Police, Bisnoi was introduced to the virtual world at the age of 15 and first hacked a website a year later, as “revenge”, after his sister was denied admission by a school.
“At the age of 16, he first hacked a school’s website when his sister didn’t get admission,” a source in Delhi police claimed.
“Introduced to the virtual world”. How clandestine.
First off, this is access journalism of the worst kind – neither to make sensible claims nor to name your sources. Public officials, including the police, shouldn’t be allowed to get away with being anonymous sources in articles; if they absolutely must remain unnamed, the publisher should specify the reason that the publication has decided to grant anonymity, on every occasion. (The Wire Science recently adopted this protocol, inspired by The Verge). Otherwise, as a reader, there is no one to hold accountable.
Second, I once ‘hacked’ a website to find out the class XII board exam score of a friend. However, does it count as ‘hacking’ when the website loaded the results for all roll-numbers as HTML, on its source page, but didn’t display them on the front-end, so all I had to do was right-click on the displayed page, click ‘view source’, and be able to access all the data? How good a hacker is depends both on the hacker’s skills and how well the object of their hack is guarded; if the object is barely concealed, we can learn nothing of the hacker’s prowess. And in this case, since Niraj Bishnoi allegedly hacked a school’s website, I sincerely doubt he did more than I did.
According to police sources, the code script of the Bulli Bai app has been recovered from his laptop — a high-end gaming machine, with a heady duty graphic card. Sources claimed the laptop only had games and porn.
Please, I’m laughing. A high-end gaming machine? My laptop is a high-end gaming machine. Any devices with Apple M1 or AMD Ryzen chips are high-end gaming machines. Many smartphones these days are high-end gaming machines. And what is “only games and porn” supposed to imply? Other of course than that the case against him apparently rests on one of the most tiresome snowclones of this age.
Those who know Bisnoi personally, also claim him to be a “loner”, someone who is more active in the virtual world than in the real one around him.
Sources in Delhi Police told ThePrint that Bishnoi displayed “abnormal behavioural traits” in his interaction with the police and has threatened to commit suicide multiple times since his arrest.
“He has told the police that he will fatally hurt himself — cut his veins with a blade, hang himself to death,” the source mentioned above claimed.
A second source added: “He doesn’t eat, has to be forced to eat. Today he skipped lunch. We had to order food from outside to feed him around 3.30 pm.”
This seems like the beginnings of some kind of personality profile that’s supposed to imply that Niraj Bishnoi was mentally unsound in some way – but which is psychotic in its own right for forgetting that none of these are excuses for what he allegedly did. I’m only prompted to recall the excuses many alleged perpetrators bandied about during the height of the #MeToo allegations – that they had PTSD, anxiety, depression, etc.; some only alluded to vague mental health concerns. These individuals may actually have had these conditions or disorders, as the case may be, but none of them implied any consequences that would have prevented the individuals from knowing that what they were doing – at the time they were doing it – was wrong. Yet such excuses persisted, and only served to further stigmatise others who were unwell in the same way, especially in the company of their parents, employers and others.
The probe so far has revealed that Bisnoi is addicted to the internet and his laptop, claimed sources. They also claimed that the 20-year-old is accustomed to creating fake accounts and user handles on social media platforms.
Is my tax money paying for this probe? Also, I once created 22 GMail accounts, simply because each one comes with 15 GB of space on Google Drive. The point is none of this is dispositive proof – or even points towards dispositive proof – that Niraj Bishnoi did what he allegedly did. Wouldn’t the bit about fake handles on social media platforms be true for every troll out there? The story so far only suggests that the Delhi police is building a loseable case and/or that it is colluding with Niraj Bishnoi’s lawyers to manufacture sympathy for his plight.
“Bishnoi has said that he doesn’t talk to anyone much in the outside world, that he doesn’t like to talk to anyone and that he has no friends in the real world. His only interactions are under assumed names and identities in the virtual world. His day starts and ends with the internet and laptop,” the second source claimed.
Police claims of the accused’s being a recluse are repeated by acquaintances who knew Bishnoi while he was a school student, and who spoke to ThePrint on condition of anonymity.
All of them described the accused as a “loner”, someone who was used to staying “aloof” and “didn’t interact much with the outside world” since he was a teenager.
“He has created his own virtual world around him,” claimed an acquaintance doesn’t want to be identified.
Ah, the stereotype has landed. As another colleague of mine said, Niraj Bishnoi probably lives in his mother’s basement, too.
And Naomi Barton, yet another colleague, said: “Also, lots of people are loners who spend the majority of their time in digital spaces – and that can be both good and bad, for instance queer children who don’t have any community in real life. What this story is doing is pretty much just blowing innocuous, if generationally different, habits out of proportion to scare-monger.”
Referring to another of the accused’s behavioural traits, the second police source claimed: “Whenever the interrogation hits a certain peak, he urinates in his pants. He has done this three-four times. We have checked if this is because he has a medical issue, but he doesn’t.”
If The Print hadn’t already crossed a line, it has now – by forwarding as it if were a knock-knock joke on WhatsApp the Delhi police’s claim that Niraj Bishnoi can urinate on demand when the “interrogation hits a certain peak”. Hits a certain peak? Is this a euphemism for the intensity of the interrogation? And what sort of ‘behavioural trait’ is this in which the bearer of the trait urinates – the insinuation being that he does this for reasons other than what might make people pee in these situations – for anything other than because something has prompted him to?
According to the source, the 20-year-old has also not expressed remorse for his alleged involvement in the ‘Bulli Bai’ app.
“He said he did the right thing,” claimed the source.
Finally, something that doesn’t sound ridiculous, although it isn’t worth publishing.
Ultimately, if Niraj Bishnoi – and others, to be sure – was responsible in any part for the ‘Bulli Bai’ app, he needs to be brought to justice and he needs to have a fair (and sensible) trial. But what we could all do without is a ‘news report’ that brings the nonsensical claims of the Delhi police – words that appear to be designed to exonerate the alleged actions of Niraj Bishnoi, but which may yet backfire, and nothing to remain sensitive to the people that the app has harmed – out to thousands of readers, if not more, without qualifying/rebutting them as warranted instead of letting them rot in the rooms in which they were manufactured.
“It would not be unusual for finger-stick testing to be met with skepticism,” says a spokesman for Theranos. “Patents from that period explain Elizabeth’s ideas and were foundational for the company’s current technologies.”
Vanity Fair received this statement from Theranos, the company entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes founded claiming to revolutionise healthcare but ended up being sued by investors, employees and patients for fraud, in response to a query from the magazine presumably asking about how/why Holmes thought her idea would work despite many medical experts telling her it wouldn’t. The idea in question: to use just a pinprick of blood from each patient to check for more than 200 conditions/diseases/etc. using a portable machine. In effect, Holmes, and Theranos, were attempting to shrink the blood-testing process, make it cheaper and more automated. It would have revolutionised healthcare if it weren’t for two things: the machine didn’t work, and Holmes/Theranos raised capital and made promises to investors, patients and US government institutions to the effect that it did. Holmes founded the company in 2003, reached great (Silicon-Valley-esque) heights around 2014-2015, and was dissolved in September 2018. Holmes’s trial began on August 31, 2021, earlier this week. Her colleague Ramesh Balwani is also to stand trial, and that’s expected to begin early next year. In case you’d like to catch up too, I recommend watching the HBO documentary about Holmes and Theranos, The Inventor, and reading articles by John Carreyrou (Wall Street Journal) and Nick Bilton (Vanity Fair) published between 2015 and 2018.
Towards the end, The Inventor dwells for a bit on Holmes’s state of mind: at a time when Theranos was besieged by allegations of fraud, conspiracy and knowingly subjecting its customers (technically, patients) to dysfunctional medical tests that endangered their lives, and when nobody believed its blood-testing machine, called ‘Edison’, could ever work as promised, Holmes carried on as if nothing was wrong and, in fact, according to people still at Theranos at the time, she exuded hope and confidence that the company was on the verge of a turnaround. She was clearly swindling people – diverting the money they’d invested and paid into supporting a lavish lifestyle – but seemed to believe she wasn’t. The Inventor offers (only) one explanation, that Holmes was a zealot: “a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their … ideals”. Without knowing more about what went on inside Theranos, especially since it’s downfall began, it’s hard to dispute this characterisation. (However, CNBCreported on August 28: “In a bombshell revelation just days before her criminal fraud trial, defense attorneys for Elizabeth Holmes claim she’s suffered a ‘decade-long campaign of psychological abuse’ from her former boyfriend and business partner Ramesh Balwani.”)
Until the end of The Inventor, and the stories by Carreyrou and Bilton, Holmes holds her ground that Theranos’s revolutionisation of healthcare is only a day away. If we assumed for a moment that Holmes really didn’t believe, in any corner of her mind, that she’d knowingly cheated people and had known that ‘Edison’ and Theranos were both part of one big sham, we’re confronted with some discomfiting questions about how we define our successes. Did Theranos conflate scepticism with impossibility – i.e. “this can’t work because the laws of nature don’t allow it” versus “this can’t work because it is disruptive”?
The Theranos story is about many things — one of them is that it highlights a highway Silicon Valley has built to its arbitrarily defined form of success that starts from one of the same points from which many success stories in the rest of the world, the real world but especially the world of scientific research, begin: “I wonder why that doesn’t work”. So it’s easy to get confused – as many journalists, investors and Holmes’s fellow entrepreneurs did – and to believe that you’re taking one highway when you may just be starting on the other. And I wish I could say the rest of the real-world highway has some checks and balances to kill bad ideas, and these the Silicon Valley highway lacks. Problems in scientific publishing, including and leading up to the replication crisis across subjects, would prove me wrong; in fact, these parallels are quite important, if only for us to reflect on why reputation-based measures of success exist. One of my favourite examples in history is that of Dan Shechtman, described here. A common example from India would be any institute that attempts to evaluate scientists’ application for promotion based on the journals in which they’ve published their papers, instead of the papers’ contents. A common and more global example: ‘prestige’ journals’ historic preference for papers with sensational results (over all papers with reliable results). And a more recent example: the Australian Resarch Council’s announcement last week that it wouldn’t consider preprint papers towards scientists’ applications for many fellowships it funds.
According to one of Bilton’s articles: “On the Friday morning that they gathered in the war room, Holmes and her team of advisers had believed that there would be one negative story from the [Wall Street Journal], and that Holmes would be able to squash the controversy. Then it would be back to business as usual, telling her flawlessly curated story to investors, to the media, and now to patients who used her technology” (emphasis added). Such ‘curation’ had allowed Theranos to be valued at $9 billion (her stake at $4.5 billion), count Henry Kissinger as a board member, Walgreens as a partner, a prominent investment firm as an investor and Joe Biden as a supporter.
This said, there’s still one big difference between the two highways: one has a better, if still quite inchoate, understanding of failure. Failure in science comes in many forms, but I know of at least two ways in which the research enterprise often ‘moves on’. One of course is retractions — and there are more scientists today than there were in decades past who are coming on board the idea that retractions are a good thing, not something to be stigmatised. The other is an increasingly deeper understanding of research fraud, the different circumstances in which it manifests, and the steps scientists and science administrators must take to prevent them from recurring. For all its lucre, the Silicon Valley highway in Theranos’s case didn’t appear to offer Holmes the opportunity of a graceful exit, so much so that it wasn’t a highway to success so much as a railroad to zealotry. That even when your product fails, you haven’t failed until you can raise no more money, until you can keep up the appearance of being successful and have a shot at being actually successful. This is also why Carreyrou, among others, has said: “It’s going to be a wake-up call for venture capitalists and young entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. If you go too far, if you push the envelope and hype and exaggerate to the point of lying, it becomes securities fraud.” It fails to surprise me that even ‘pushing the envelope’ – presumably a euphemism for ‘smaller’ lies – is okay and that it becomes wrong/bad only when it grabs the SEC’s attention (even when most of us outside the American billionaire class aren’t likely to forget the house of cards that was the 2008 financial disaster).
Hopefully Holmes’s trial and eventual conviction will be the moment Silicon Valley stops stigmatising failure, begins to disconnect the appearance of success from success itself, and ultimately allows companies to fail without condemning their leaders at the same time. And yes, I know how ridiculous such hope sounds.
Featured image: Elizabeth Holmes in 2013. Credit: US Department of Defence, public domain.
Thus far, the composition of claims in my pieces has followed a simple pattern, even a rule: I break down a claim into a series of reasons that, when processed in serial fashion, leads up to the final thing. This has made writing pieces easy. As long as I had a claim, and deemed it to be good by whatever parameters, all I had to do was break it down into a linear chain of reasons, to be understood in sequence.
This sort of communication has an obvious disadvantage: it doesn’t lend itself to the composition of long ideas. By these I mean claims that can’t be understood by parsing one reason after another, like pulling on Ariadne’s thread. Instead, they require an Ariadne’s weave, so to speak – multiple reasons understood at once. Think of it like a particularly long series of instructions, and that to understand each instruction, the reader should be expected to have only two pieces of information: that contained in the immediately preceding instruction and that contained in the current instruction. I think I can do this well. What I’ve struggled to do, and in fact have frequently avoided (by reconfiguring what I’m trying to say), is to require the following: to compile a long series of instructions with three pieces of information at a time – that contained in the immediately preceding instruction, that contained in the present one and that contained in an arbitrary prior instruction. It’s hard for me to construct such claims or arguments fundamentally because I don’t fully understand how the reader might cognate them. (I assume here, of course, that making sense of claims made one after another is the simplest way to cognate complex ideas.)
For example, in the movie Arrival, the aliens communicate using circular logograms. Each logogram is equivalent to a full sentence written in English. But while an English sentence constructs meaning by placing down one word after the next (so that the order of words can change the overall meaning as well as that the claims made towards the end of the sentence are overemphasised, by virtue of being more recent in time, and thus memory), the aliens’ logograms make meaning by presenting all the parts of each ‘sentence’ at once, forcing their interlocutor to cognate them at once, in parallel as it were. There is an analogy in a post I published recently (‘Climate: The US needs to do more – and India needs to, too’, August 31, 2021). Here, I write that understanding claim X* requires us to consider two sub-claims at once; let’s call them P and Q*. In my post, I specify P and Q, and then I explain Q before explaining P. I did this so that the post would have flow – of the narrative moving (as) seamlessly (as possible) from one argument to the next. (You may notice that most articles in the news, especially those published by Indian mainstream English newspapers, almost always reject flow in favour of laying out P and Q, whatever they are, in that order.) Which of the two ways is better? Neither, in my view; instead, I’d prefer a visual layout that more faithfully reflects the structure of the argument:
* X = despite its rating on Climate Action Tracker, India’s climate actions are insufficient; P = climate change will affect India more than it will affect most other countries; Q = ‘they aren’t cutting emissions, so we won’t either’ is a real, if misguided, argument.
This way, the reader doesn’t have to consider P and Q one after the other but can in parallel. (Of course, literary purists may consider this to be an abdication of the writer’s duty to write in such a way that the reader isn’t at all confused about the relative weight of two sets of arguments (P and Q), but if we had to pacify purists to begin with, I wouldn’t be writing this post. (This said, I must say that I don’t like listicles for the same reason: each one of them represents a failure on the writer’s part to not give a damn about things like flow, structure, etc. – and each instance is in effect an abdication of the writer’s responsibility to write. However, on this slippery slope, both listicles and visually representing the writer’s intended location of arguments in the reader’s psyche are higher up than demanding that we must fully embrace our immutable linearity of the human condition at all times.)(Strained argument, I know.))
I’m writing all of this down because I recently composed a long idea, and noticed it as I was doing so. The long idea was for the post ‘They’re trying to build a telescope’ (published August 19, 2021) – specifically, the following portion:
And now, astronomers in China have published a paper expressing their excitement about having spotted a new location at which to mount a telescope, themselves overlooking considerations of whether the people who are already there might be okay with it. As a result they may have effectively shut one option out. This is an important factor because, as Rao has written (see excerpt below), many people seem to think that Hawaiians’ resistance to the TMT and others of its kind on the islands is fairly recent; this is not true. They expressed their opposition how they could; the rest of us didn’t pay attention.
Here, I’m talking about how astronomers didn’t allow Hawaiians to say a telescope couldn’t be erected at a particular site by framing the terms on which they commenced negotiations in a way that precluded the option of not having a telescope. Making my point here required me to draw on the conclusion of the post until that point in the narrative and, more importantly, a point Rao builds up to in the excerpt (from his article) that follows. As a result, I ended up effectively telling the reader: this is what I’m saying; Rao’s words will prove my point, but unfortunately, you’ll have to read them yourself; I won’t be able to guide you to the end; once you finish reading the excerpt from his article, I hope you will be able to see what I’m trying to say. Alternatively, if I had to represent this visually, the narrative diagram would look something like this:
That is, Q follows P, but at the same time they ought to be considered together in order to understand what follows. I don’t know about you, but psychologically, I’d find any argument presented this way to have greater potential to be misconstrued than an argument that is entirely, and straightforwardly, linear. Axiomatically, I edit any text to ensure that an idea it contains that is already likely to be misunderstood (due to certain historical connotations, say) is couched in a narrative that is linear to the extent possible; any bit of non-linearity will allow readers to order reasons the wrong way – particularly, placing effect before cause – and construe a claim that isn’t being made at all. Finally, I acknowledge that this post may seem wholly confused, in which case I apologise for wasting your time; I also didn’t conduct a literature review before I started, and am more than likely to have recreated something scholars already know, may have articulated better, and in fact may have debunked as well. If you’re aware of any such things, please let me know (by email or on Twitter, where I’m @1amnerd).
Shortly after the IPCC published the first installment of its AR6 report, The Wire Science produced a short video explaining the report’s salient points. It swiftly met with some backlash from some scientists, who were miffed that the video spoke about India reducing its carbon dioxide emissions without emphasising that the US and many European nations needed to commit to greater reductions than others.
I’m wary that repeatedly stressing that point could lead to a mindset that if the US, the UK, Germany, etc. don’t reduce their emissions, India has a free-pass to not reduce its emissions either. From a bird’s eye view, this ‘free pass’ might seem like a distant possibility considering, according to Climate Action Tracker, India is on course to do its bit to keep the world’s average surface temperature increase below 2º C over pre-industrial levels – the Paris Agreement line. However, there are two issues here that should dispel this sense of satiation.
First, climate change will affect India more than it will affect most other countries, and what India needs to do to stave off the worst of these effects is not something Climate Action Tracker or any other global monitor measures. Second, ‘they are not doing it, so we won’t either’ is a not-so-distant possibility because it has already turned up in some narratives – but especially ones concerned with getting people out of poverty.
The latter, we are told, is a carbon-intensive exercise, but we must also consider how and to whom the benefits of such development accrue, considering arguments that India should be allowed to emit some more carbon dioxide for some more time typically emerge when a hydrocarbon extraction project in Tamil Nadu, a transshipment project in Nicobar, an iron-ore mine in Goa, a railway line in Maharashtra, an oil pipeline or sand-mine in Assam, a solar-power plant in Rajasthan or a diamond-mine in Bundelkhand is at stake.
As M. Rajshekhar has written in Seminar, one big difference between the UPA I/II and the BJP I/II governments is that the former was corrupt and sought profits, while the latter is corrupt and seeks rent. Under the BJP, Adani, Reliance, Essar and a few other corporate groups have benefited inordinately to the exclusion of most others, as a result oligopolising a swathe of the country’s natural resources, including forests, mountains, water bodies and non-agricultural land. This is not sustainable development and can’t possibly lead to it either.
In this sense, Rajshekhar wrote for CarbonCopy, “the country’s inability to lift its people out of poverty shouldn’t become an unlimited pass to pump greenhouse gases into the air.” That is, if eliminating poverty is taking the form of allowing Adani, Reliance, Essar, etc. to pad their bottom lines by building roads, airports and railway tracks (often to the rejection of all ecological wisdom), then the emissions resulting from these activities don’t deserve to be excused. And considering the incumbent government has made a habit of accelerating and approving such projects, the added pressure of having to cut emissions is a good thing.
On the first count, that climate change will affect India more than most: climate policy expert Kapil Subramanian broke down the IPCC report’s predictions in three different emissions scenarios for the South Asia region, and found that “the 1º C difference in warming in South Asia between the SSP 2-4.5 and the SSP 1-2.6 scenarios is more than worth fighting for.” (This is the difference between global mean surface temperature rise of 1.8º C and 2.7º C.)
As examples, he discusses projected weather patterns – which we ought to consider as conservative ‘estimates’ – over India corresponding to the scenarios: more days of extreme heat, more flood-causing rainfall and longer summer monsoons, and extreme events that happened once a year likely happening 4-6 times a year. Climate Action Tracker or any other similar entities that take a big-picture view of India’s actions are blind to these considerations, to which India alone can, and must, respond.
So while emphasising that the US and some European countries should do more at every turn is important in some fora, we don’t have to do it at every turn all the time. Instead, we need to flip our own demands, bearing in mind that ‘cutting emissions’ – i.e. mitigation – isn’t the full picture. India needs to cut its own emissions, irrespective of how much the US, the EU, etc. are cutting, while transitioning to sustainable development (long fricking shot but we must demand it), and, on a related note, make its adaptation policies better and more just.
The US needs to do more; India needs to do more as well.
