Category: Op-eds

To the moon – or the stock market?

Now this is quite upsetting. I learn from Jatan Mehta’s Moon Monday #166 that Intuitive Machines – the maker of the Odysseus spacecraft that landed on the moon on February 22 – may have lied about the circumstances of the landing attempt in order to protect its market value, before ‘correcting’ itself later. Excerpt:

Previously, the publicly traded company prematurely stated post-landing that Odysseus is “upright”, only to correct it in a media briefing timed to the closing of the stock market an entire day later. Now it turns out even the NASA LiDAR onboard … actually did not assist Odysseus’ landing in the last 15 kilometers of descent due to a delay in processing its data.…Are we supposed to believe that descent telemetry on Mission Control screens … never made it clear to the company and NASA that the LiDAR readings weren’t coming through to the lander’s navigation system? Or that it wasn’t clear in the following few days either?…A [NASA] payload called SCLPSS was flown on Odysseus to specifically study the lander’s engine plume effects on lunar soil during the final descent phase. NASA says the payload did not do said imaging. And yet the agency states in the same release that “the bottom line is every NASA instrument has met some level of their objectives.” A subsequent report by Eric Berger [of Ars Technica] reads: “As of Wednesday [February 28], NASA had been able to download about 50MB of data. The baseline for success was a single bit of data.” Was this criteria for success made clear and public pre-launch?

NASA has rightly defined the ideal standard for communications over the years by placing what data its probes collect as soon as possible in the public domain. (This responsibility even led to some tension in the book and the film The Martian.) So it’s really disappointing, and frankly a little infuriating, to see this bad-faith effort from Intuitive Machines.

Its Odysseus mission was funded by NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme and it carried six NASA instruments (including SCLPSS) to the moon. Even if Intuitive Machines isn’t implicitly required to follow NASA’s communications policies, NASA needs to ensure the companies it contracts to fly its payloads – to ease its own path to the moon in future – do. As Jatan also pointed out, the onus to communicate lies with NASA: CLPS is publicly funded and without it missions like Odysseus wouldn’t happen. We need explicit policies to streamline these companies’ communications expectations to follow NASA’s rather than their share prices.

It’s also a poor look for NASA to celebrate Odysseus’s success the way it did (was it to protect Intuitive Machines again?). CLPS is a billion-dollar programme to ferry NASA payloads to the moon. How do you call the mission a “success” if the payloads aren’t collecting data?

We don’t want tax money to disappear into black holes like this that release no or, worse, misleading information.

Government by Supreme Court

On February 27, a bench of the Supreme Court upbraided Patanjali Ayurved and its chairman Acharya Balkrishna for continuing to disparage systems of medicine other than Ayurveda (technically, what it calls Ayurveda) and claiming its products offer “permanent relief” from “blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis, asthma and obesity” in its advertisements, despite having assured the court in November 2023 that it won’t do so. The Indian Medical Association had filed the case in August 2022 alleging that Patanjali Ayurved had flouted the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act 1954 and its Rules.

It’s a straightforward case with an understandable outcome, but it isn’t unsurprising. That Patanjali Ayurved so openly violated the Act and the Rules – but also good sense, as Pushpa Mitra Bhargava pointed out in an excoriating essay in 2016 – forced the IMA to approach the court, and for some time now the courts have been the last democratic institutions in India interested in upholding the law (and even then it’s iffy). The ‘backstop’ the courts have offered against advertisements in particular running away with bullshit has been particularly useful because the laws are not so much outdated as unable to respond to the new ways in which advertisers are twisting words, taking advantage of grey areas, and, generally, “telling a lie in a way that it appears to be the truth,” in Bhargava’s words.

More importantly, advertisement regulation in India is weak. As Kaushik Moitra and Shreya Sircar wrote in 2022 (emphasis added):

Advertisers must address complaints regarding deviations from the ASCI Code. If such complaints are not remedied, ASCI may take coercive steps to regulate the (allegedly) offending advertisement. Illustratively, ASCI may recommend that broadcasters not air the offending advertisement and may also publish instances of non-compliance by advertisers on its website. ASCI may also report infractions to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.

Additionally, – and uniquely for a self-regulatory organisation in India – ASCI has been recognised as a self-regulator under the Cable Television Networks (Amendment) Rules, 2021. ASCI promulgations are advisory and can neither supplant nor supersede the law. Moreover, ASCI cannot compel compliance. However, any action brought against an advertiser for breach of ASCI promulgations will proceed on the basis that ASCIs position has statutory endorsement.

It’s ultimately up to some government agency to take action and to advertisers to check themselves. In 2010, ASCI had flagged more than “50 campaigns by ayurvedic and homeopathic drug makers offering a cure for COVID-19 in April alone” to the government. The charge was grounded not in the 1954 Act but in a Ministry of AYUSH order earlier that month prohibiting the advertisement of AYUSH-related claims about curing COVID-19.

In fact, between April 2014 and July 2024, a portal of the Department of Consumer Affairs said it had logged more than 1,400 misleading advertisements pertaining to AYUSH products and services. Similarly, the Pharmacovigilance Centres for Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani and Homeopathy Drugs reported 18,812 “objectionable advertisements” between 2018 and 2021. In 2022, the ASCI also reported 1,229 misleading AYUSH-related advertisements between 2017 and 2019. Yet the same ministry is unconcerned when Patanjali Ayurved offers unsubstantiated (possibly intentionally ambiguous) “permanent relief” from a variety of conditions. In fact, “unconcerned” is inaccurate. On February 19, 2021, the then Union health minister Harsh Vardhan endorsed a ‘drug’ developed by Patanjali Ayurved, called Coronil, and which the minister, Balkrishna (the chairman), and Baba Ramdev claimed was the “first evidence-based medicine for coronavirus”. It wasn’t; it was an untested quack-remedy backed by spurious claims that the WHO had certified it.

Such circumstances force those who are concerned about the effects of these advertisements to approach the courts for relief, and it is heartening that the courts among all institutions retain some sense. Yet this is also a tragedy: if the regulations that the government has put in place are followed and enforced properly by regulatory agencies, people wouldn’t have to approach courts for every remedy. Courts are already burdened with a large number of cases; equally, judges – while being equipped to examine the propriety of processes and adherence to the law and Constitutional principles – are not subject experts.

In the Patanjali Ayurved case, of course, the company was advancing clearly pseudoscientific claims backed by non-existent data, and its defence was easy to dismiss. What would happen when, say, the government approves a poorly tested vaccine with a known risk of injury in the event of a self-determined emergency; a civil society group files a petition asking for the approval to be rolled back; and the government contends that the group is spreading vaccine hesitancy? The court shouldn’t be expected to be able to examine the results of clinical trials, yet it may have to. In fact, contemporary environmental governance offers a real example of such a problem in action.

Unlike a specialised expert tribunal, Constitutional courts don’t possess the necessary skill and expertise to examine the technical and scientific correctness of any project. Judges are trained to examine and adjudicate on the legality and propriety of the decision-making process.

Environmental lawyer Ritwick Dutta wrote this in The Hindu following the Joshimath disaster, when the Union government halted work on the Helang-Marwari bypass. This work had received a green signal from the Supreme Court in 2022 to proceed, raising “questions about the validity of the apex court’s decision” (not that the Union government was opposed to the project).

The separation of powers is a division of labour, rendered more critical than other such divisions by the need to keep the greatest powers of the land in check. Yet it has often been flouted, such as the Supreme Court’s decision to set up the Central Empowered Committee, which stands in between the Standing Committee of the National Board for Wildlife and the Union Cabinet when approvals for non-forest use of sanctuaries and national parks are at stake. If this committee disagrees with a decision of the Standing Committee, the committee can forward it to the Supreme Court with its own opinion for the apex court to take the final call – a clear violation of the separation of powers.

However, not everyone would have thought so at the time many such measures were instituted. The environment ministry created the committee in 2002 following a Supreme Court direction in T.N. Godavarman, “for the purposes of monitoring and ensuring compliance of the orders of the … Supreme Court covering the subject matter of environment, forest and wildlife, and related issues arising out of the said orders and to suggest measures and recommendations generally to the State, as well as Central Government, for more effective implementation of the [Environment (Protection)] Act and other orders of the Court” (source).

Since then, however, and in keeping with Dutta’s assessment, the Supreme Court has adjudicated on the “technical and scientific correct” of various projects. That the environment ministry has parallelly and persistently weakened safeguards to protect the country’s natural resources to favour ‘ease of business’ has only allowed the court to intervene further. But at the same time, because the politically instituted mechanisms to protect the lives and livelihoods of people and the well-being of flora and fauna living near sites of resource extraction exist more and more only in theory, researchers, activists, and others have also welcomed the court’s interventions to nix deleterious project proposals. (In September 2023, in fact, the environment minister replaced the Supreme Court’s committee with a new one of the same name, populated fully with members that report to the ministry.)

Simplistically, those in charge are making bad decisions and those not supposed to be in charge are making good decisions.

A Q&A about philosophy in journalism

Earlier this year, Varun Bhatta, assistant professor of philosophy at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhopal, reached out to ask me some questions for something he was writing about the representation of philosophical ideas in journalism. He interviewed others as well and subsequently wrote and published his article with The Wire on March 2, 2024.

I’m pasting the conversation the two of us had in full below, with Varun’s permission. Varun also wrote the introductory note, as a preface to the questions. His questions are in bold; my responses are in normal type.

Preface

Newspaper journalists, while writing on a topic, use theories and ideas from history, sociology, economics, sciences and other disciplines to establish the relevance of the topic and analyse the pertinent questions. However, rarely do they draw from philosophical theories that are equally relevant to the topic. Why is it that, for instance, we do not see social/moral/political philosophers’ views also being presented in articles on social topics? Similarly, while presenting a scientific topic, it is not common to find insights from the philosophy of science. Why is that philosophy glaringly absent in newspaper journalism that otherwise seamlessly synthesises views from numerous domains while presenting on a topic?

The non-engagement with philosophy is a characteristic of journalism across the world. There have been a few initiatives – both from journalists and philosophers – to bridge this gap in the Global North. One of the well-known projects in this regard was the column The Stone at the New York Times. Irish Times still runs a philosophy column Unthinkable. There have been very few journalists who have expressed their fruitful engagement with philosophy. (See here and here.) Also, the new kind of journalism brought by Aeon and The Conversation has provided the much-required niche space for philosophy. 

The situation in India, however, is abysmal. Indeed, this is largely due to the poor state of philosophy in India and this is not a new point. However, what is not known is the story from the other side. What is Indian journalists’ perception of philosophy and why is that they do not use philosophy? Regarding this, I want to interview a few print/online newspaper journalists and editors. I am also planning to converse with a few journalism faculty as the non-engagement with philosophy might be a symptom of the journalism curriculum that is largely taught in India.

Understanding the perspectives of journalists, I think, is the first step towards remedying the gap in the Indian context. This can open up the conversation between journalists and philosophers to create meaningful journalism projects to make philosophy relevant to the Indian public.

Q&A

1. Why do you think journalists do not draw from philosophical theories/ideas while analysing a topic and writing articles? I am asking this because online/print newspaper journalists draw from theories/ideas of other disciplines (social sciences, history, sciences) in spite of these being nuanced and complex (for both writers and readers).

It depends what exactly you mean by ‘philosophy’ because from where I’m sitting I disagree with the assertion in your question that Indian journalists don’t use philosophical ideas or theories in their work. They use it both directly and indirectly. They use it directly when making decisions about what kind of events, stories, and phenomena they’d rather cover and why. When I say I’m a journalist biased towards principles encoded in the Indian Constitution, there’s a philosophy of journalism at work there. I’m mindful of the philosophical position of falsifiability when I conclude there’s no point trying to fact-check or rebut a claim like “Sanskrit is a good language for AI”. Journalists use philosophy indirectly when drawing on all those other fields, which have been informed and honed by philosophical deliberations unique to them. For example, a philosophy of history determines how we narrativise the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation in addition to archaeological, genetic, and climatological data.

If your question is why journalists don’t write articles containing ideas from philosophy and the views of philosophers, there are two answers.

First, all journalism needs to be in the public interest, and I’ve no idea a) what a philosophy in the public interest sounds like, which is because I don’t know what constitutes philosophy news, that could lend itself to news reports, news analyses, and news features. Is there a community, collective or organisation of philosophers in India that’s trying to reach out to more people? Where can I engage with an articulation of what I’m missing out on when I skip a comment from a philosopher for a news article? On a related note, many of us in journalism have studied journalism, which is its own field – just like philosophy – with its own tools to develop ways to frame the world, to make sense of it. I have no idea where philosophy is situated here, if at all.

b) Even if I was familiar with what philosophers are experts on, I’d imagine philosophy as a field of study faces the same resistance to being represented in the news as exotic fields (from the PoV of the publics) like high-energy physics or mathematics. When I’m trying to write on the latter, I’m banking on some sort of numerical literacy on the readers’ part. It’s impossible to explain the Langlands programme to someone who doesn’t know (or care) what functions or sets are. I haven’t had the chance to consider the level of philosophical literacy in India but I don’t think it’s very good. So broaching that kind of thinking and reasoning in an article – especially in a news article – requires the author to lay the groundwork first, which is precarious. The more words there are, the more careful you need to be about holding a reader’s attention.

There also need to be concrete developments and they need to be in the public interest, and unless a writer and/or an editor comes along who can extract these nuggets from a paper or in conversation with an expert – and in interesting ways – it’s going to have no engagement. Worse, it’s going to impose a disproportionately high opportunity cost on news-producers’ time and labour by expecting them to be able to separate philosophical wheat from chaff. I believe this goes for both whole articles about philosophy and articles that include philosophical considerations in the mix. The Hindu is trying to step around this ‘concrete developments’ requirement with two daily pages called ‘Text & Context’ and one online-only (for now) science page every weekday. These are both fairly recent developments, which is to say securing such space in a newspaper or any news-focused outlet is difficult and needs the underlying organisation to be ‘healthy’ as well as a sound editorial justification of its own.

We also need to be clear there are differences between newspapers and magazines, their sizes, remits, and frequencies of publication. Publications that take it slower and with more pages than a newspaper – or, more generally, articles that are composed over a longer time (much longer than news reports, of course) and are also lengthier (more than a few hundred words at least) are also likelier to have the time and the room to include philosophical deliberations. This is the sort of room we need (in space and time) to lay the groundwork first. Otherwise, such ideas just vanish under the unforgiving demands of the inverted pyramid.

Now the second answer: If I have to pay a writer Rs 5,000 to write a 1,000-word article about some idea or event that’s of interest in philosophical circles, and I expect (based on historical data) that 10,000 people will engage sincerely with the article, I need each one of those people to be able to readily contribute 50 paise to the publication for me to break even – and this is hard. The size of the engaged audience will actually be more like 1,000, requiring each one of those people to contribute Rs 5. And this is extraordinarily difficult given the prevailing ratios of the sizes of the overall audience, the engaged audience, and the paying audience. Similarly, if I add another page in the newspaper so I can accommodate more philosophy-centred material and charge readers Re 1 extra to pay for it (assuming here that advertisers won’t be interested in advertising on this page), will I have enough new readers to offset those who will stop buying the paper because of the higher cover price? I doubt it.

2. I think the previous question needs to be invoked at the editorial level as well. Given that editors do request the writers to make changes (like including some data on the topic or getting a comment from a particular expert), the absence of philosophy in articles might largely be due to editorial decisions and policies: what is considered as “pertinent”, “readable”, “good” etc. For instance, one of the unsaid editorial policies seems to be that philosophical discussions are best suited for op-ed columns. This kind of presumption has resulted in the ghettoisation of philosophy to certain zones in newspaper journalism.

2a. As an editor, what are your thoughts on the points? What might be the actual, pragmatic challenges journalism faces in this context?

2b. Since editors play an equally important role in “setting the agenda” and changing the reading styles of the public, what might be the ways to overcome these challenges? How to break the wall around philosophy in journalism, so that it can be accommodated/incorporated in mainstream journalism?

Imagine the industry of journalism to be like a wave propagating through a medium. Let’s divide this wave into two parts: the wavefront and the wake. Newsrooms operating at the wavefront are distinguished by the resources to experiment and innovate, take risks, and pay more than competitively for the best exponents of particular skills in the market. Newsrooms in the wake are just about staying profitable (or even breaking even), innovating in incremental fashion, avoiding risks, and trying to pay competitively. Of course neither group is monolithic – most sufficiently large news organisations have some departments that are doing well and some that are fighting to stay alive – but this is a simplification to illustrate a point. I believe your questions are about newsrooms in the wake; they’re definitely more interesting in this context. With this in mind:

2a) Newsrooms need to make money to pay their journalists without compromising editorial independence and editorial standards. This is the single largest challenge right now. In the face of this challenge, especially since the rise of news aggregators and social media platforms as sites of news consumption, so many publications have shut shop, downsized or relinquished independence, or some combination of all three. Once a newsroom’s finances are sufficiently in the green and they can graduate from the wake to the wavefront, pertinence, readability, etc. can and do become the first questions an editor asks. Of course, I may not be saying any of this if the times weren’t what they are.

2b) I’m not sure there’s a wall around journalism that blocks philosophy. In fact journalists don’t have the freedom to choose (or decline, for that matter) what they consider to be ‘news’. But the flip side of this is no particular enterprise can be said to be entitled to a journalist’s attention. The reason this is so is because of how public interest is constructed.

For example, there’s a contest – very simply speaking – these days between a journalism that holds we’re doing the country a disservice by turning our heads away from everything that’s going wrong and another that’s particular about pointing its head in the opposite direction. Another example of a similar contest is centred on whether journalists should make plain their biases – because everyone is biased in some way – or if they should cover the news without losing (a reasonable) equipoise.

In these or any other scenarios, whatever constitutes the public interest is built jointly by journalists and the consumers of the knowledge they produce, and will vary from one publication to the next. The Hindu, The Wire, and The New York Times have different covenants with their readers about what public interest looks like, or ought to look like. The construction of the public interest is a shared and complicated enterprise that takes time.

As a result, most journalism, in the present era at least, follows some publics; journalism doesn’t lead them. This also means – taking all of these business, economic, and social forces together – that when people aren’t interested in philosophy-related matters, there’s not much an editor (in a newsroom-in-the-wake) can do to change that.

3. I need your comment on another editorial decision about the op-ed columns that have a specific implication for the Indian context. One of the ways academic journalism scales up the dissemination is by publishing the articles with Creative Commons licence. For instance, The Conversation and Aeon are using this method. The idea seems to be working very well. Create a niche space for academic journalism that usually does not have space in mainstream journalism and make up for the readership through free or paid syndication. This approach seems to be working well, and has provided a good working model.

However, in an uneven world, this does not favour everyone equally. Given its international scale/level/reach, this works well for the Global North academicians who have access to these platforms. Indian scholars do not have easy access to Aeon or The Conversation. And Indian online platforms have easy access to quality articles without having to deal with Indian scholars.

These issues are pertinent for most of the academicians in India. But I want to articulate the problem from the perspective of philosophy. This method of republishing further widens the gap between philosophers and journalism in India. This way of operating does not provide enough motivation for Indian newspaper editors to work with Indian scholars. In spite of publishing philosophy articles, Indian editors do not seem to be interested/invested in working/collaborating with Indian philosophers and commissioning articles. (Republishing international articles has a further implication: it deepens the imbalance between Western and Eastern philosophical systems.)

Would like to know your comments/thoughts on the above note.

I’m uncomfortable with providing a general comment. Please let me know if you have specific questions.

Free/paid syndication option of articles in international platforms indeed provides straightforward access to quality content for Indian platforms. And given the restriction of resources like time and finances, and largely the dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public, it is understandable what the Indian platforms are doing. Having said that, do you agree that there are implications of this shortcut approach? The first implication is about the politics of knowledge and representation, whose views are represented, etc. The second implication is the perpetuation of Indian journalism’s impatience to work with local scholars. If it does not invest and work with, say Indian philosophers, even for op-eds, the problem persists.

I agree wholeheartedly with the first implication. To republish from publications in the US, Europe and the UK that syndicate their articles on a Creative Commons licence is effectively to represent the views of the scholars quoted in those articles – mostly from Global North countries – instead of the views of others, especially those from India (from the PoV of Indian newsrooms and readers). However, it’s important to ask whether this really imposes the sort of opportunity cost that prevents Indian journalists from still trying to work with and represent the views of Indian scholars in other articles. My answer is ‘no’ simply because of the difference in the amount of effort expended in republishing an article and reporting on a scholar’s work, views, etc. Put another way, it takes me a few minutes to identify an article on, say, The Conversation that will work ‘well’ on my site and a few more minutes to republish it. Doing so won’t subtract from the responsibilities of or resources available to a reporter on my team. So if/when a publication says it is making do with stories from The Conversation, the problem arises with people in the newsroom who are choosing not to engage with Indian scholars – irrespective of whether it can or does republish articles from other outlets.

I also want to clarify something about the “dearth of good Indian academicians who can write for the public” in your question: there isn’t so much a dearth of good academicians who can write, there’s a dearth of academicians who believe communication at large is important at all. I’ve been fortunate enough to find more than a few scientists who are eager to write, and to be frank their numbers are increasing, but my experience is that the vast majority of scientists working in India distrust the media too much and/or don’t believe that the scientific work they undertake needs to be communicated to non-scientists – much less that they need to be the ones doing it. (I’m also setting aside the fact that many of the better scientists working in the country also shoulder many responsibilities beyond teaching and research, especially important administrative tasks, and communication – especially of the form that their employers may not recognise when considering people for promotions, etc. – only adds to this burden.) My point here is that the task of finding scientists to write is a lot more arduous than might seem at first glance.

I feel the same way about the second implication you’ve set out in your question: journalists are not impatient per se; what you may perceive as impatience is likelier than not the effect of newsroom mechanics that expect journalists to be productive to a degree that precludes prolonged engagement with scholars. Also, the distinction I pointed out in my first set of replies matters greatly. If you’re writing for a magazine or if you’re writing a news feature, you’ll have the time and the word limit for such engagement. But if you’re writing a news report for a newspaper, you will have neither the time and the word limit for nor – importantly – any expectation from your readers of slow-cooked material in the article. Finally, while I’ve tried to describe what is, I don’t think I’m prepared to call it justification. I think large newsrooms, especially those departments of such newsrooms that are closer to the wavefront than others, should try (honestly) to establish opportunities for slow-cooked material in their products.

Schrödinger’s temple

On January 22, in a ceremony led by Prime Minister and now high-priest Narendra Modi, priests and officials allegedly consecrated the idol of Lord Ram at the new temple in Ayodhya, with many celebrities in attendance. (‘Alleged’ because I don’t know if it’s a legitimate consecration, given the disagreement between some spiritual leaders over its rituals.) TV news channels on both sides of the spectrum were outwardly revelling in the temple’s festivities, bothering not at all with covering the ceremony in a dispassionate way. Their programming was unwatchable.

This Ram temple is a physical manifestation of the contemporary Indian nation – a superposition of state and sanctum sanctorum at once, collapsing like Schrödinger’s hypothetical cat to one or the other depending on political expedience. The temple, like many others around the country now, is both kovil and katchi office (Tamil for ‘temple’ and ‘party office’).

(I’m hardly unique in these views but I also suspect I’m in a minority, with few others to reinforce their legitimacy, so I’m writing them down so they’re easier for me to recall.)

After the consecration ceremony, Prime Minister Modi delivered a speech, as is his wont, further remixing the aspirations of the Indian state and its people with a majoritarian religious identity. (The mic then passed to the treasurer of the temple trust, who spoke in praise of Modi, and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, who spoke in praise of Modi’s ostensible ideals.) For now, the results of the Lok Sabha elections later this year seem like a foregone conclusion, with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party widely expected to begin a third term in May. The temple’s opening was effectively a show of strength by Modi, that he delivers on his promises no matter the obstacles in his way, even if any of them are legitimate.

Before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, in another show of strength, the Modi government signed off on the anti-satellite (ASAT) missile test in March, in which a missile launched from the ground flew 300 km up and destroyed a dummy satellite in earth orbit. The operation was called ‘Mission Shakti’ (Hindi for ‘strength’). A statement from the Ministry of External Affairs said, “The test was done to verify that India has the capability to safeguard our space assets”. Oddly, however, the Defence R&D Organisation, which conducted the test, had had ASAT capabilities for a decade by then under its Ballistic Missile Defence programme, rendering the timing suspect.

Considering Prime Minister Modi delivered another hour-long speech after the test, I’ve been inclined to side with the theory that it was conducted to give him airtime that was otherwise unavailable due to the Election Commission’s restrictions on election candidates coming on air in a short period before polling. In 2024, of course, it’s an open secret that the Election Commission determines polling schedules based on the BJP’s convenience.

Ram temple at science ‘festival’

The Surya Tilak project had courted controversy in the past with Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra flagging it on social media in November 2021. The CSIR officials, however, defended the project arguing the scientific calculations that went into making the system.

‘Surya Tilak at Ram temple at the India International Science Festival backed by the Union Science Ministry’, Deccan Herald, January 18, 2024

This is a succinct demonstration of science’s need for a guiding hand. The Indian Science Congress isn’t happening this year, which is both for the better and otherwise, but given the vague allegations that have cast its status in limbo, I remain suspicious that its star declining (further) at the same time that of the India International Science Festival (IISF) is rising isn’t a coincidence. The latter has a budget of Rs 20-25 crore, according to the Deccan Herald article quoted above, “contributed by various scientific departments”.

The absolute value of India’s expense on scientific research is increasing – a horn the national government has often tooted – but as a percentage of the GDP as well as of the total annual budget, it is dropping. In this milieu, it’s amusing for the government to suddenly be able to provide Rs 20-25 crore for the IISF, when in fact the Department of Science and Technology has been giving the Science Congress a relatively lower Rs 5 crore and which last year alleged unspecified “financial irregularities” on the part of its organisers.

But as with the Science Congress, it wouldn’t be fair to dismiss the IISF altogether for some problematic exhibits and events. This said, CSIR officials contending the “Surya Tilak” of the upcoming Ram temple in Ayodhya deserves to be exhibited at the IISF because “scientific calculations” went into designing it is telling of the relationship between science, religion, and the Indian state today.

Considering there are government regulations stipulating the minimum structural characteristics of every building in the country, any non-small structure in the country could have been included in the IISF exhibit. Don’t be absurd, I hear you say, and that’s just as absurd as the officials’ reasoning.

Natural philosophy in many ancient civilisations, including those in India, was concerned with the motions of stars and planets across the sky and seasonal changes in these patterns. So as such, using the principles of modern science to design the “Surya Tilak” isn’t objectionable, or even remarkable.

But the fact that IISF is being organised by Vijnana Bharati, an RSS-affiliated body, and that Vijnana Bharati’s stated goal is “to champion the cause of Bharatiya heritage with a harmonious synthesis of physical and spiritual sciences” makes the relationship suspect – in much the same way the Vedas and other parts of India’s cultural heritage have become tainted by association with the government’s Hindutva programme. And these suspicions are heightened now thanks to the passions surrounding the impending consecration of the Ram temple idol.

A practice of science that constantly denies its political character is liable to be, and has been, appropriated in the service of a larger political or ideological agenda – but this isn’t to say science, more specifically the national community of science exponents, should assume a monolithic political position. Instead, it’s to say this is precisely the cost of misunderstanding that science and politics, as human endeavours go, are immiscible. It’s to say that scientists’ widespread and collective aspiration to be apolitical implicitly admits political influence and that we should all understand that it’s not desirable for science to be appropriated in this way. And when it is, we must bear in mind how these unions have become deleterious and how the two of them can be, or ought to be, separated so that we understand what science is (and isn’t) and what sort of legitimacy it should (and shouldn’t) be allowed to grant the state.

Defying awareness of the value of separating science and (a compromised) state strikes to me as being fundamentally antisocial because such awareness is the first step to asking how and in what circumstances they ought to be separated. It undermines the possibility of this awareness taking root. This isn’t new but in the increasing fervour surrounding the Ram temple, and India’s temple-state dis-separation the event will consummate, the importance of its loss seems heightened as well.

Char Dham will go on

“One of the greatest rescue missions in history” necessitated by a construction project pushed through at high cost, beginning with the safety and well-being of workers. Madam, what are you celebrating aside from such an event having been a matter of time?

“No government agency was left out. Be it the Health Ministry, the Road Ministry or the Railway Board – all brought their expertise on board. The Department of Telecom too ensured a better communications network at the site,” said Lt. Gen. Syed Ata Hasnain (retired), a Member of, the National Disaster Management Authority, at a press briefing.

The Indian Air Force, the National Disaster Response Force and the Border Road Organisation, along with State agencies such as the State Disaster Management Authority (SDMA) and the State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) and local administration also came together.

“This could happen only when there are clear instructions from the PM and the PMO,” added Mr. Hasnain.

The Hindu, November 28, 2023

The less time it takes to get all the men out, the faster the need for an accident followed by a rescue will leave the news cycle, and the less effort needs to be expended to force work on the Char Dham highway to continue. (It’s not for nothing that Manipur continues to simmer.) Then again, if push comes to shove, they may just blame it on a contractor, fire him, and move on.

“I won’t send him here [Silkyara] ever again, no matter what,” said Romen Narajari, brother of Ram Poshak Narajari who is one among the 41 workers trapped inside the Silkyara tunnel after a collapse that took place on November 12, on the day of Deepavali. After multiple efforts, all the 41 workers were rescued on Tuesday. …

Rajni has not informed her three children about the mishap that took place with their father till Tuesday. “There were days when I felt like life has ended for us. Whenever I spoke to him over phone, he used to cry and ask about children. I am glad that our miseries ended but I will not let him work out of our hometown, ever again,” Rajni added.

The Hindu, November 28, 2023

Good call – but awful that this is how they find out how much risk their family members are at.

On India’s new ‘Vigyan Puraskar’ awards

The Government of India has replaced the 300 or so awards for scientists it used to give out until this year with the Rashtriya Vigyan Puraskar (RVP), a set of four awards with 56 laureates, The Hindu has reported. Unlike in the previous paradigm, and like the Padma awards to recognise the accomplishments of civilians, the RVP will comprise a medal and a certificate, and no cash. The changes are the result of the recommendations of a committee put together last year by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).

The new paradigm presents four important opportunities to improve the way the Indian government recognises good scientific work.

1. Push for women

A note forwarded by the Department of Science and Technology, which has so far overseen more than 200 awards every year, to the MHA said, “Adequate representation of women may … be ensured” – an uncharacteristically direct statement (worded in the characteristic style of the Indian bureaucracy) that probably alludes to the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar (SSB) Awards, which were only announced last week for the year 2022.

The SSB Awards are the most high-profile State-sponsored awards for scientists in the old paradigm, and they have become infamous for their opaque decision-making and gross under-representation of women scientists. Their arbitrary 45-year age limit further restricted opportunities for women to be nominated, given breaks in their career due to pregnancies, childcare, etc. As a result, even fewer women have won an SSB Award than the level of their participation in various fields of the scientific workforce.

According to The Hindu, to determine the winners of each year’s RVP awards, “A committee will be constituted every year, comprising the Secretaries of six science Ministries, up to four presidents of science and engineering academies, and six distinguished scientists and technologists from various fields”.

The SSB Awards’ opacity was rooted in the fact that candidates had to be nominated by their respective institutes, without any process to guarantee proper representation, and that the award-giving committee was shrouded in secrecy, with no indication as to their deliberations. To break from this regrettable tradition, the Indian government should publicise the composition of the RVP committee every year and explain its process. Such transparency, and public accountability, is by itself likely to ensure more women will be nominated for and receive the awards than through any other mechanism.

2. No cash component

The RVP awards score by eliminating the cash component for laureates. Scientific talent and productivity are unevenly distributed throughout India, and are typically localised in well-funded national institutes or in a few private universities, so members of the scientific workforce in these locales are also more likely to win awards. Giving these individuals large sums of money, that too after they have produced notable work and not before, will be redundant and only subtract from the fortunes of a less privileged scientist.

A sum of Rs 5 lakh may not be significant from a science department’s point of view, but it is the principle that matters.

To enlarge the pool of potential candidates, the government must also ensure that research scholars receive their promised scholarships on time. At present, delayed scholarships and fellowships have become a tragic hallmark of doing science in India, together with officials’ promises and scramble every year to hasten disbursals.

3. Admitting PIOs

In the new paradigm, up to one of the three Vigyan Ratna awards every year may go to a person of Indian origin (PIO), and up to three PIOs may receive the Vigyan Shri and Yuva-SSB awards, of the 25 in each group. (PIOs aren’t eligible for the three Vigyan Team awards.)

Including PIOs in the national science awards framework is a slippery slope. An award for scientific work is implicitly an award to an individual for exercising their duties as a scientist as well as for navigating a particular milieu, by securing the resources required for their work or – as is often the case in India – conducting frugal yet clever experiments to overcome resource barriers.

Rewarding a PIO who has made excellent contributions to science while working abroad, and probably after having been educated abroad, would delink the “made in India” quality of the scientific work from the work itself, whereas we need more awards to celebrate this relationship.

This said, the MHA may have opened the door to PIOs in order to bring the awards to international attention, by fêting Indian-origin scientists well-known in their countries of residence.

4. Science awards for science

The reputation of an award is determined by the persons who win it, illustrated as much by, say, Norway’s Abel Prize as by the Indian Science Congress’s little-known ‘Millennium Plaques of Honour’. To whom will the RVP prizes be awarded? As stated earlier, the award-giving committee will comprise Secretaries of the six science Ministries, “up to” four presidents of the science and engineering academies, and six “distinguished” scientists and technologists.

These ‘Ministries’ are the Departments of Science and Technology, of Biotechnology, of Space, and of Atomic Energy, and the Ministries of Earth Sciences and of Health and Family Welfare. As such, they exclude representatives from the Ministries of Environment, Animal Husbandry, and Agriculture, which also deal with research, often of the less glamorous variety.

Just as there are inclusion criteria, there should be exclusion criteria as well, such as requiring eligible candidates to have published papers in credible journals (or preprint repositories) and/or to not work with or be related in any other way to members of the jury. Terms like “distinguished” are also open to interpretation. Earlier this year, for example, Mr. Khader Vali Dudekula was conferred a Padma Shri in the ‘Science and Engineering’ category for popularising the nutritional benefits of millets, but he has also claimed, wrongly, that consuming millets can cure cancer and diabetes.

The downside of reduction and centralisation is that they heighten the risk of exclusion. Instead of becoming another realm in which civilians are excluded – or included on dubious grounds, for that matter – the new awards should take care to place truly legitimate scientific work above work that meets any arbitrary ideological standard.

Hasan Minhaj’s search for the premise

When Hasan Minhaj spoke on his show about living through some dangerous experiences as a Muslim man from an Indian family growing up in the US of A, he wasn’t speaking the truth. He told Clare Malone of The New Yorker that his stories have “seeds” of truth”, that his comedy is 70% “emotional truth—this happened” and 30% “hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction”. First, we really need to use words other than ‘truth’ to talk about things that aren’t true the way a ‘truth’ is expected to be. Second, I was only queasy as long as it seemed that Minhaj was passing off other similar people’s stories as his own, but then it seemed to be that they weren’t anyone’s stories at all, a problem exacerbated by the ways in which they involved women. Then he said this, which rang closer home in a different way:

“The punch line is worth the fictionalized premise”

So he had a punchline and went looking for a premise – the sort of thing that’s sunk scientists and journalists when they tried to do the same thing. It’s also the trope that cryptocurrencies popularised in the heyday of ‘investments’ in bitcoin and NFTs. They were solutions looking for problems, and when solutions look for problems, they tend to ignore the structural factors that create the problems. For example, crypto-bros wanted to democratise the ownership of pieces of art rather than letting them accumulate in the hands of extremely wealthy individuals. But NFTs aren’t concerned with the relationships between creditors and debtors, wealth and social signalling, and art and capitalism. So they failed to make a difference.

But that shouldn’t diminish the irony that the world today is one big premise looking for a punchline, sometimes desperately. In India itself, the incumbent BJP government has assumed many elements of authoritarian and fascist ideologies in its rule, and the social fabric has suffered. One cause of suffering is that the government has, together with unscrupulous TV news anchors and some supine public institutions, vitiated public dialogue, spread misinformation, deviated in spirit from the implementation of the RTI Act, and suppressed the production and release of data from public surveys and research that are critical of its dogma.

One consequence of all this for journalists has been that proof that might seal a causal relationship between a hypothesis and a set of facts is often out of reach, and too often just so. During the pandemic, for example, almost every instance of health journalism was also an instance of investigative journalism. In the last decade, using various forms of retaliation and sanction, the government has silenced some critics and forced others to think twice before responding to reporters. In this milieu, journalism can build only a more incomplete picture of reality as we experience or even observe it (more than subjective experiences that it couldn’t fully capture anyway). Individuals are free to piece together the rest in their imagination, and they do. But for journalists at least, it’s a cardinal sin to present this extrapolation as fact. It’s important, but it’s not fact. This was for example one of the issues with Ronan Farrow’s work during the #MeToo movement.

Minhaj isn’t a journalist and punchlines aren’t reports put together through journalistic work – yet his quote is insightful to the practice of journalism. After substituting “conclusion” for “punch line”, for instance, we have a faithful reflection of what might have gone wrong with The Wire‘s TekFog and Meta reports last year, and after which The Wire sued Devesh Kumar, the person at the centre of both investigative efforts, for deceiving The Wire‘s journalists. Kumar had allegedly invented the raison d’être of both series to match what many of us have come to accept as an incontestable reality.

(Note: I worked with The Wire at the time these reports were published but wasn’t involved in reporting or publishing them. I have, however, since unpublished one post on this blog in which I considered TekFog’s implications for science journalism.)

The alleged premise in both cases was broadly that people affiliated with the BJP were using sophisticated IT tools to manipulate the spread of hateful messages (‘TekFog’) and removal of anti-party sentiment (‘Meta’) on social media platforms. The conclusions in both sets of reports – before The Wire repudiated them – were in line with the fact that BJP leaders have regularly resorted to communalising rhetoric to win votes and BJP governments have jailed people for social-media posts criticising the party’s views and actions. But it soon became clear that the conclusions weren’t worth the premise even in circumstances as difficult as those created by the foot-soldiers of Hindutva. This to me is what makes Minhaj’s rationale so disagreeable.

Of course, journalism is different from a talk-show, but Malone’s reply to Minhaj as he tries repeatedly to justify the fictionalising should resonate with anyone who claims to relate the truth but doesn’t: “But it didn’t happen to you.” (Who is experiencing the event matters as well, so the last two words may be redundant.) It’s the simplest argument against confirmation bias, and it also speaks to an important part of the identity of comedians like Minhaj, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, etc.: they’re a source of new information about the world insofar as they expect to be perceived to be credible when they tell us how to think about that information, and that so happens to be in the form of jokes.

While Minhaj is influential, the outing of his more striking anecdotes as untrue leaves him the story, as it did Farrow and Kumar, rather than the actual people and ideas that he apparently wished to highlight. And that’s harmful to those people and ideas. In the words of legal scholars Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry, writing in 1997 in the aftermath of the Tawana Brawley case:

Indifference to the distinction between fact and fiction minimizes real suffering by implying that it is no worse than imagined or self-inflicted suffering.

A difficulty celebrating Chandrayaan 3

I’m grateful to Avijit Pathak for his article in Indian Express on August 29.

After the Chandrayaan 3 mission achieved its primary objective, to soft-land a robotic lander on the moon’s south polar region, there was widespread jubilation, but I couldn’t celebrate. I felt guilty and distressed, actually, with the thought that my well-rewarded scepticism of India’s affairs these days had finally scabbed over (and back) into cynicism. Even the articles I wrote on the occasion had to pass via the desk of a colleague, who helped spruce them up with some joy and passion.

I had a few hypotheses as to the cause. One was that, by virtue of knowing what exactly happened behind the scenes, and having followed it for many years, I saw the really wow-worthy thing to be some solution to some problem with Chandrayaan 2 that, if fixed, would lead to success today. But something about it didn’t ring true.

Another that did was rooted in an anecdote I’d heard or read many years ago, I can’t recall where. There was a stand-up comic event in Bombay. During a break, the comic steps out to the side of the building and has a smoke. A short distance away, he sees some people from the audience stream out for some fresh air. A beggar approaches this group asking for money. They tell him that if he shouts BMKJ, they will give him 10 rupees. He does, and they hand him the money and walk back in. The comic (who is the narrator) then says that he doesn’t want to make this crowd laugh and leaves.

I don’t know if I have ever been a nationalist but I have been and am a patriot. In his article, Pathak berated the “muscular nationalism” fostered by the Bharatiya Janata Party and its consequences for the forms that the education, practice, and expression of science have taken in the country. In this milieu, he wrote, he couldn’t bring himself to overtly celebrate the success of Chandrayaan 3, tracing his arrival at this conclusion from the ‘first principles’ of the reactions to the mission, its “political appropriation” by the powers that be, and the unglamorous nature of work to bridge the “gap between technology as a spectacle and science as a way of life”. It is this articulation for which I’m grateful: I couldn’t find the path myself, but now I know.

Celebration isn’t for the outcomes of a single mission on one occasion. It’s for all the outcomes of a process that assimilates many impulses, driven by multiple beliefs and aspirations. Chandrayaan 3 may have been a resounding success but imagine it is one point in a process, and then take a look at what lies behind it. I see an island called ISRO, the unique consequences of India’s fortuitous history, and the miracles that have become necessary for celebration-worthy scientific success in India today.

Among the distributed sweets, the light and sounds of the firecrackers, and the torrent of applause, I sense the comedian’s jokes to ease the mind of a nation that preserves this state of affairs.

A request to ISRO about Chandrayaan 3

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has said its launch window for the Chandrayaan 3 mission is July 12-19. For now, the mission is expected to lift off on July 14 (at 2.35 pm IST). Chandrayaan 3’s mission is the same as that of its predecessor, Chandrayaan 2, with some marginal additions.

It has the same hardware configuration, including a lander named ‘Vikram’ containing a rover named ‘Pragyan’, attached to a propulsion module. The surface lunar mission has a planned lifetime of 14 days. The lander has four scientific payloads and the rover, two. The propulsion module itself has one. The biggest difference between the two missions, it would seem, are changes to reduce the chances of another crash-landing. As Jatan Mehta wrote in his ‘Moon Monday’ newsletter:

To increase the chances of sticking the landing this time around, ISRO has made several upgrades to the Chandrayaan-2-like lander, such as software improvements to accommodate failure, strengthened legs, a couple of new sensors for enhanced and redundant navigation-related measurements, and better power and communication systems.

Chandrayaan 3’s success will strengthen India’s position within the Artemis Accords, which it signed just last month, because it will make the country one of only four to have landed and operated a rover on the Moon. But as much as ISRO has a good reason to aim for success, it may have an opportunity if the mission fails as well – an opportunity to show that it has matured as an organisation.

The Chandrayaan 2 mission experienced a partial, but significant, failure on September 7, 2019, when its lander, bearing the rover, crashed on the lunar surface instead of gently touching down. ISRO researchers later traced the problem to a glitch in the onboard computer that lowered the amount by which the lander had to decelerate as it descended and an issue in the propulsion system. But a few months passed between the crash and the crash report, and in this time, the public conversation surrounding the accident was a cesspool of hyper-nationalist narratives and counterproductive statements by senior ISRO members.

As soon as news of the lander’s crash became public, ISRO stopped communicating updates, and refused to admit – despite all the evidence pointing that way – it had happened for a full week. In keeping with the national BJP government’s mission until then to make the Indian space programme a matter of national pride by couching its feats in a nationalist narrative, social media platforms were inundated with claims from the usual corners that the part of the mission that had failed was a “technology demonstrator” that made up a minor part of Chandrayaan 2.

Around this time, then ISRO chief K. Sivan also told journalists that the Chandrayaan 2 mission was a “98% success” – a stunningly disingenuous attempt to downplay what had been, until the mission’s launch, the basis of many of ISRO’s claims to greatness as well as which had occupied hundreds of scientists and engineers for several years. Technology demonstrators are important, but ‘Vikram’ and ‘Pragyan’ weren’t just that; more importantly, no way they were just 2% of the mission. Yet Sivan had been the one to say such a thing, even if he later palmed the blame off to a review committee, even as the organisation he helmed made Herculean efforts to reestablish contact with ‘Vikram’. All of this vitiated the narrative of the incident.

To make matters worse, after the lander’s crash on the day, journalists gathered at the ISRO HQ in Bengaluru were treated to a scene as Pallava Bagla shouted demanding Sivan address them. When ISRO members other than Sivan did turn up, he was rude. Bagla later apologised for his behaviour – but not before a senior Congress leader, Abhishek Singhvi, called Bagla “insane” and asked for him to be sacked. It seemed for a time that no one was interested in letting the dust settle.

For those who were plainly curious about the mission’s technical specifics as they existed, the specifics in which ISRO’s lessons for future missions, including Chandrayaan 3, would take root, the sole resource (in my limited experience) was the ISRO forum on Reddit, where independent spaceflight enthusiasts were putting together and combing through photos captured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to find the lander’s resting place and clues to the cause of the accident.

The Indian government has a penchant for cutting access to information after major accidents and disasters. It did so after the Joshimath landslip, when ISRO reported that the town had slid by 5.4 cm in 12 days. It did so after it supposedly liberated Jammu and Kashmir by abrogating Article 370 of the Constitution. It did so after the Manipur riots and is yet to restore connections in the state, going so far as to brook long-winded arguments about access to VPNs in the process.

Even before Chandrayaan 2, there were some signs that ISRO had become part of the fold, including – but not limited to – the BJP government’s narratives of ISRO’s feats, the organisation’s increasing opacity, and pettiness in the face of criticism. In 2018, its then chief Sivan said that ISRO would like to lead international efforts to mine helium-3 on the Moon and transport it to the earth, disregarding the unhelpful hype and pseudoscience surrounding the isotope’s potential as a nuclear fuel.

More recently, Sivan’s successor and current chief S. Somanath claimed that India has had a “knowledge society” since “Vedic times”, that Indians’ accomplishments were appropriated by Western scholars who then regurgitated it as their own findings, and that “those working in the fields of artificial intelligence [and] machine learning love Sanskrit”.

These signs aren’t encouraging, but it’s possible to hope that these individuals and their advisors will put ISRO above themselves and their opinions. I sincerely wish that Chandrayaan 3 succeeds to the tune of 100%. At the same time, space is hard, as they say (especially for less-well-funded and less-well-technologically supplied organisations like ISRO).

And in the event of a failure, I hope ISRO will respond by sharing regular and timely updates, answer journalists’ queries, think before speaking, and, overall, conduct itself with the grace of being the premier space-faring body of the Global South.

Note: This article was updated at 5.10 pm on July 7, 2023, to include an issue with the propulsion system among the reasons Chandrayaan 2’s surface mission failed. Featured image: The LVM 3 launch vehicle lifts off bearing Chandrayaan 2 from Sriharikota, July 22, 2019. Credit: ISRO.