casteism – Close Read

The importance of sensible politics to good science

Stuart Ritchie writes a newsletter-blog that I quite like, called Science Fictions. On May 30, he published a post on this blog entitled ‘Science is political – and that’s a bad thing’. I thought the post missed some important points, which I want to set out here. First, the gist of his argument:

[About the “argument from inevitability”] After a decade of discussion about the replication crisis, open science, and all the ways we could reform the way we do research, we’re more aware than ever of how biases can distort things – but also how we can improve the system. So throwing up our hands and saying “science is always political! There’s nothing we can do!” is the very last thing we want to be telling aspiring scientists, who should be using and developing all these new techniques to improve their objectivity. … [About the “activist’s argument”] If you think it’s bad that politics are being injected into science, it’s jarringly nonsensical to argue that “leaving politics out of science” is a bad thing. Isn’t the more obvious conclusion that we should endeavour to lessen the influence of politics and ideology on science across the board? If you think it’s bad when other people do it, you should think it’s bad when you do it yourself. … If we encourage scientists to bring their political ideology to the lab, do we think groupthink—a very common human problem which in at least some scientific fields seems to have stifled debate and held back progress—will get better, or worse?

There’s also a useful list of what people mean when they say “science is political”:

Ritchie writes below the list: “There’s no argument from me about any of those points. These are all absolutely true. … But these are just factual statements – and I don’t think the people who always tell you that ‘science is political’ are just idly chatting sociology-of-science for the fun of it. They want to make one of two points” – referring to the inevitability and activism argument-types.

I agree with some of his positions here, not all, but I also think it might be useful to specify an important set of differences with the way the terms “politics” and “science” are used, and in the contexts in which they’re used. The latter are particularly important.

The statement “science is political” is undeniably legitimate in India – a country defined by its inequalities. Science and technology have historically enjoyed the patronage of the Indian state (in the post-war period) and the many effects of this relationship are visible to this day. State-sanctioned S&T-related projects are often opaque (e.g. ISRO, DAE and DRDO), top-down (e.g. Challakere and INO) and presume importance (e.g. Kudankulam and most other power-generation projects).

India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru baked science into the Indian nation-project with his stress on the “scientific temper”; his setting up of institutes of higher science education and research; and the greater liberty – and protection from having to justify their priorities – he accorded the nuclear and space programmes (yoking them to the nation’s prosperity but whose work and machinations today are not publicly accessible).

But counterproductively, the Nehru government’s policies also stunted the diffusion of ‘higher’ technologies into society. Currently, this access is stratified by class, caste, location and gender: wealthy upper-caste men in cities and poor lower-caste women in villages lie at the two extremes of a spectrum that defines access to literacy and numeracy, healthcare, public transport, electricity and water, financial services, etc.

Second, asking the question “is science political?” in some country in which English is the first language is different from asking it in a Commonwealth country. Pre-Independence and for many years after, English-speakers in government were typically Brahmins hired to help run the colonial government; outside of government, access to the English language was limited, though not uncommon. Today, access to English – the language of science’s practice – is controlled through the institutions that teach and/or regularly use the language to conduct trade and research. Yet English is also the language that millions aspire to learn because it’s the gateway to better wages and working conditions, and the means by which one might navigate the bureaucracy and laws more effectively.

In these ways, a question arises of who can access the fruits of the scientific enterprise – as well as, perhaps more importantly, whether one or a few caste-class groups are cornering the skills and benefits relevant to scientific work for ends that their members deem to be worthier. When a member of an outgroup thus breaks into a so-called “top” research institute with the characteristics described above, their practice of science – including the identifies of existing scientists, and their languages, aspirations, beliefs and rituals – is inevitably going to be a political experience as well. Put another way, as access to science (knowledge, tools, skills, findings, rewards) expands, there are also going to be political tensions, questions and ultimately reorganisations, if we take ‘politics’ to mean the methods by which we govern ourselves.

In this regard, the political experience of science in India is inevitable – but that doesn’t mean it will always be: the current historical era will eventually make way for a new one (how political the practice of science will be, and its desirability, in that period is a separate question). Nor does it mean we should lower the thresholds that define the quality of science (relevant to points 2, 6 and 8 in Ritchie’s list) in our country. But it does mean that the things about science that concern a country like ours (post-colonial/imperial, agricultural, economically developing, patriarchal, majoritarian, diverse) can be very different from those that concern the UK or the US, and which in turn also highlights the sort of political questions that concern a country the most.

With this in mind, I’d also contend against junking the “argument from inevitability” simply because, in India, it risks prioritising the needs of science over those of society. A very simple (and probably relatable) example: if a lab that has been producing good research in field X one day admits an ESL student belonging of a so-called “lower” caste, it has to be able to tolerate changes in its research output and quality until this individual has settled in, both administratively and in terms of their mental health. If the lab instead expects them to work at the same pace and with the same quality as existing members, the research output will suffer. The student will of course produce “sub-par” work, relative to what has been expected of the lab, and might be ejected while the institutional causes of her reasons to “fail” will be overlooked.

By undertaking such socially minded affirmative action, research labs can surmount the concerns Ritchie flags vis-à-vis the “argument from inevitability” (i.e. by recalibrating v. compromising their expected outcomes). They can also ensure the practice of science produces benefits to society at large, beyond scientific knowledge per se – by depoliticising science itself by admitting the political overtones mediating its practice and improving access to the methods by which good science is produced. It bears repeating, thus, that where science is a reason of state and daily life in all its spheres is governed by inequalities, science needs to be political.

NCBS fracas: In defence of celebrating retractions

Continuing from here…

Irrespective of Arati Ramesh’s words and actions, I find every retraction worth celebrating because how hard-won retractions in general have been, in India and abroad. I don’t know how often papers coauthored by Indian scientists are retracted and how high or low that rate is compared to the international average. But I know that the quality of scientific work emerging from India is grossly disproportionate (in the negative sense) to the size of the country’s scientific workforce, which is to say most of the papers published from India, irrespective of the journal, contain low-quality science (if they contain science at all). It’s not for nothing that Retraction Watch has a category called ‘India retractions’, with 196 posts.

Second, it’s only recently that the global scientific community’s attitude towards retractions started changing, and even now most of it is localised to the US and Europe. And even there, there is a distinction: between retractions for honest mistakes and those for dishonest mistakes. Our attitudes towards retractions for honest mistakes have been changing. Retractions for dishonest conduct, or misconduct, have in fact been harder to secure, and continue to be.

The work of science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik allows us a quick take: the rate at which sleuths are spotting research fraud is far higher than the rate at which journals are retracting the corresponding papers. Bik herself has often said on Twitter and in interviews how most journals editors simply don’t respond to complaints, or quash them with weak excuses and zero accountability. Between 2015 and 2019, a group of researchers identified papers that had been published in violation of the CONSORT guidelines in journals that endorsed the same guidelines, and wrote to those editors. From The Wire Science‘s report:

… of the 58 letters sent to the editors, 32 were rejected for different reasons. The BMJ and Annals published all of those addressed to them. The Lancet accepted 80% of them. The NEJM and JAMA turned down every single letter.

According to JAMA, the letters did not include all the details it required to challenge the reports. When the researchers pointed out that JAMA’s word limit for the letter precluded that, they never heard back from the journal.

On the other hand, NEJM stated that the authors of reports it published were not required to abide by the CONSORT guidelines. However, NEJM itself endorses CONSORT.

The point is that bad science is hard enough to spot, and getting stakeholders to act on them is even harder. It shouldn’t have to be, but it is. In this context, every retraction is a commendable thing – no matter how obviously warranted it is. It’s also commendable when a paper ‘destined’ for retraction is retracted sooner (than the corresponding average) because we already have some evidence that “papers that scientists couldn’t replicate are cited more”. Even if a paper in the scientific literature dies, other scientists don’t seem to be able to immediately recognise that it is dead and cite it in their own work as evidence of this or that thesis. These are called zombie citations. Retracting such papers is a step in the right direction – insufficient to prevent all sorts of problems associated with endeavours to maintain the quality of the literature, but necessary.

As for the specific case of Arati Ramesh: she defended her group’s paper on PubPeer in two comments that offered more raw data and seemed to be founded on a conviction that the images in the paper were real, not doctored. Some commentators have said that her attitude is a sign that she didn’t know the images had been doctored while some others have said (and I tend to agree) that this defence of Ramesh is baffling considering both of her comments succeeded detailed descriptions of forgery. Members of the latter group have also said that, in effect, Ramesh tried to defend her paper until it was impossible to do so, at which point she published her controversial personal statement in which she threw one of her lab’s students under the bus.

There are a lot of missing pieces here towards ascertaining the scope and depth of Ramesh’s culpability – given also that she is the lab’s principal investigator (PI), that she is the lab’s PI who has since started to claim that her lab doesn’t have access to the experiments’ raw data, and that the now-retracted paper says that she “conceived the experiments, performed the initial bioinformatic search for Sensei RNAs, supervised the work and wrote the manuscript”.

[Edit, July 11, 2021, 6:28 pm: After a conversation with Priyanka Pulla, I edited the following paragraph. The previous version appears below, struck through.]

Against this messy background, are we setting a low bar by giving Arati Ramesh brownie points for retracting the paper? Yes and no… Even if it were the case that someone defended the indefensible to an irrational degree, and at the moment of realisation offered to take the blame while also explicitly blaming someone else, the paper was retracted. This is the ‘no’ part. The ‘yes’ arises from Ramesh’s actions on PubPeer, to ‘keep going until one can go no longer’, so to speak, which suggests, among other things – and I’m shooting in the dark here – that she somehow couldn’t spot the problem right away. So giving her credit for the retraction would set a low, if also weird, bar; I think credit belongs on this count with the fastidious commenters of PubPeer. Ramesh would still have had to sign off on a document saying “we’ve agreed to have the paper retracted”, as journals typically require, but perhaps we can also speculate as to whom we should really thank for this outcome – anyone/anything from Ramesh herself to the looming threat of public pressure.

Against this messy background, are we setting a low bar by giving Arati Ramesh brownie points for retracting the paper? No. Even if it were the case that someone defended the indefensible to an irrational degree, and at the moment of realisation offered to take the blame while also explicitly blaming someone else, the paper was retracted. Perhaps we can speculate as to whom we should thank for this outcome – Arati Ramesh herself, someone else in her lab, members of the internal inquiry committee that NCBS set up, some others members of the institute or even the looming threat of public pressure. We don’t have to give Ramesh credit here beyond her signing off on the decision (as journals typically require) – and we still need answers on all the other pieces of this puzzle, as well as accountability.

A final point: I hope that the intense focus that the NCBS fracas has commanded – and could continue to considering Bik has flagged one more paper coauthored by Ramesh and others have flagged two coauthored by her partner Sunil Laxman (published in 2005 and 2006), both on PubPeer for potential image manipulation – will widen to encompass the many instances of misconduct popping up every week across the country.

NCBS, as we all know, is an elite institute as India’s centres of research go: it is well-funded (by the Department of Atomic Energy, a government body relatively free from bureaucratic intervention), staffed by more-than-competent researchers and students, has published commendable research (I’m told), has a functional outreach office, and whose scientists often feature in press reports commenting on this or that other study. As such, it is overrepresented in the public imagination and easily gets attention. However, the problems assailing NCBS vis-à-vis the reports on PubPeer are not unique to the institute, and should in fact force us to rethink our tendency (mine included) to give such impressive institutes – often, and by no coincidence, Brahmin strongholds – the benefit of the doubt.

(1. I have no idea how things are at India’s poorly funded state and smaller private universities, but even there, and in fact at the overall less-elite and but still “up there” in terms of fortunes, institutes, like the IISERs, Brahmins have been known to dominate the teaching and professorial staff, if not the students, and still have been found guilty of misconduct, often sans accountability. 2. There’s a point to be made here about plagiarism, the graded way in which it is ‘offensive’, access to good quality English education to people of different castes in India, a resulting access to plus inheritance of cultural and social capital, and the funneling of students with such capital into elite institutes.)

As I mentioned earlier, Retraction Watch has an ‘India retractions’ category (although to be fair, there are also similar categories for China, Italy, Japan and the UK, but not for France, Russia, South Korea or the US. These countries ranked 1-10 on the list of countries with the most scientific and technical journal publications in 2018.) Its database lists 1,349 papers with at least one author affiliated with an Indian institute that have been retracted – and five papers since the NCBS one met its fate. The latest one was retracted on July 7, 2021 (after being published on October 16, 2012). Again, these are just instances in which a paper was retracted. Further up the funnel, we have retractions that Retraction Watch missed, papers that editors are deliberating on, complaints that editors have rejected, complaints that editors have ignored, complaints that editors haven’t yet received, and journals that don’t care.

So, retractions ~~– and retractors –~~ deserve brownie points.

Caste, and science’s notability threshold

A webinar by The Life of Science on the construct of the ‘scientific genius’ just concluded, with Gita Chadha and Shalini Mahadev, a PhD scholar at HCU, as panellists. It was an hour long and I learnt a lot in this short time, which shouldn’t be surprising because, more broadly, we often don’t stop to question the conduct of science itself, how it’s done, who does it, their privileges and expectations, etc., and limit ourselves to the outcomes of scientific practice alone. The Life of Science is one of my favourite publications for making questions like these part of its core work (and a tiny bit also because it’s run by two good friends).

I imagine the organisers will upload a recording of the conversation at some point (edit: hopefully by Monday, says Nandita Jayaraj); they’ve also offered to collect the answers to many questions that went unanswered, only for lack of time, and publish them as an article. This was a generous offer and I’m quite looking forward to that.

I did have yet another question but I decided against asking it when, towards the end of the session, the organisers made some attempts to get me to answer a question about the media’s role in constructing the scientific genius, and I decided I’d work my question into what I could say. However, Nandita Jayaraj, one of The Life of Science‘s founders, ended up answering it to save time – and did so better than I could have. This being the case, I figured I’d blog my response.

The question itself that I’d planned to ask was this, addressed to Gita Chadha: “I’m confused why many Indians think so much of the Nobel Prizes. Do you think the Nobel Prizes in particular have affected the perception of ‘genius’?”

This query should be familiar to any journalist who, come October, is required to cover the Nobel Prize announcements for that year. When I started off at The Hindu in 2012, I’d cover these announcements with glee; I also remember The Hindu would carry the notes of the laureates’ accomplishments, published by the Nobel Foundation, in full on its famous science and tech. page the following day. At first I thought – and was told by some other journalists as well – that these prizes have the audience’s attention, so the announcements are in effect a chance to discuss science with the privilege of an interested audience, which is admittedly quite unusual in India.

However, today, it’s clear to me that the Nobel Prizes are deeply flawed in more ways than one, and if journalists are using them as an opportunity to discuss science – it’s really not worth it. There are many other ways to cover science than on the back of a set of prizes that simply augments – instead of in any way compensating for – a non-ideal scientific enterprise. So when we celebrate the Nobel Prizes, we simply valorise the enterprise and its many structural deformities, not the least of which – in the Indian context – is the fact that it’s dominated by upper-caste men, mostly Brahmins, and riddled with hurdles for scholars from marginalised groups.

Brahmins are so good at science not because they’re particularly gifted but because they’re the only ones who seem to have the opportunity – a fact that Shalini elucidated very clearly when she recounted her experiences as a Dalit woman in science, especially when she said: “My genius is not going to be tested. The sciences have written me off.” The Brahmins’ domination of the scientific workforce has a cascading set of effects that we then render normal simply because we can’t conceive of a different way science can be, including sparing the Brahmin genius of scrutiny, as is the privilege of all geniuses.

(At a seminar last year, some speakers on stage had just discussed the historical roots of India being so bad at experimental physics and had taken a break. Then, I overheard an audience member tell his friend that while it’s well and good to debate what we can and can’t pin on Jawaharlal Nehru, it’s amusing that Brahmin experts will have discussions about Brahmin physicists without either party considering if it isn’t their caste sensibility that prevents them from getting their hands dirty!)

The other way the Nobel Prizes are a bad for journalists indicts the norms of journalism itself. As I recently described vis-à-vis ‘journalistic entropy’, there is a sort of default expectation of reporters from the editorial side to cover the Nobel Prize announcements for their implicit newsworthiness instead of thinking about whether they should matter. I find such arguments about chronicling events without participating in them to be bullshit, especially when as a Brahmin I’m already part of Indian journalism’s caste problem.

Instead, I prefer to ask these questions, and answer them honestly in terms of the editorial policies I have the privilege to influence, so that I and others don’t end up advancing the injustices that the Nobel Prizes stand for. This is quite akin to my, and others’, older argument that journalists shouldn’t blindly offer their enterprise up as a platform for majoritarian politicians to hijack and use as their bullshit megaphones. But if journalists don’t recast their role in society accordingly, they – we – will simply continue to celebrate the Nobel laureates, and by proxy the social and political conditions that allowed the laureates in particular to succeed instead of others, and which ultimately feed into the Nobel Prizes’ arbitrarily defined ‘prestige’.

Note that the Nobel Prizes here are the perfect examples, but only examples nonetheless, to illustrate a wider point about the relationship between scientific eminence and journalistic notability. The Wire for example has a notability threshold: we’re a national news site, which means we don’t cover local events and we need to ensure what we do cover is of national relevance. As a corollary, such gatekeeping quietly implies that if we feature the work of a scientist, then that scientist must be a particularly successful one, a nationally relevant one.

And when we keep featuring and quoting upper-caste male scientists, we further the impression that only upper-caste male scientists can be good at science. Nothing says more about the extent to which the mainstream media has allowed this phenomenon to dominate our lives than the fact of The Life of Science‘s existence.

It would be foolish to think that journalistic notability and scientific eminence aren’t linked; as Gita Chadha clarified at the outset, one part of the ‘genius’ construct in Western modernity is the inevitability of eminence. So journalists need to work harder to identify and feature other scientists by redefining their notability thresholds – even as scientists and science administrators need to rejig their sense of the origins and influence of eminence in science’s practice. That Shalini thinks her genius “won’t be tested” is a brutal clarification of the shape and form of the problem.

The life and death of ‘Chemical Nova’

You know how people pretend to win an Oscar or a Nobel Prize, right? Many years ago, I used to pretend to be the author of a fictitious but, blissfully unmindful of its fictitiousness, award-winning series of articles entitled Chemical Nova. In this series, I would pretend that each article discussed a particular point of intersection between science and culture.

The earliest idea I had along these lines concerned soap. I would daydream about how I was celebrated for kickstarting a social movement that prized access to soap and ability to wash one’s hands under running water, and with this simple activity beat back the strange practice among many of refusing to wash one’s toilet oneself, instead delegating the apparently execrable task to a housemaid.

The fantastic value of Chemical Nova should be obvious: it represented, at least to me, the triumph of logic and reasoning above class-commitments and superstition. The fantasy took shape out of my longstanding ambition to beat down a stubborn Creature, for many years shapeless, that often caused a good review, essay or news report to inspire only cynicism, derision and eventually dismissal on the part of many readers. It was quickly apparent that the Creature couldn’t be subdued with deductive reasoning alone, but for which one had to take recourse through politics and individual aspirations as well, no matter how disconnected from the pretentious ‘quest for truth’ these matters were.

Chemical Nova dissipated for a few years as I set about becoming a professional journalist – until I had occasion to remember it after Narendra Modi’s election as prime minister in 2014. And quickly enough, it seemed laughable to me that I had assumed upper-caste people wouldn’t know how soap worked, or at least of its cleansing properties. An upper-caste individual invested in the continuation of manual scavenging would simply feel less guilty with a bar of soap placed in his dirty bathroom: for scavengers to wash their hands and not be at risk of contracting any diseases.

The belief that ‘the job is theirs to perform’ could then persist unfettered, rooted as it was in some sort of imagined befoulment of the soul – something one couldn’t cleanse, out of reach of every chemical reagent, or even affect in any way except through a lifetime of suffering.

It was a disappointing thought, but in my mind, there was still some hope for Chemical Nova. Its path was no longer straightforward at all insofar as it had to first make the case that the mind, the body and the community are all that matter, that that’s how one’s soul really takes shape, but its message – “ultimately, wash your hands” – still was an easy one to get across. I was tempted and I continued to wait.

However, earlier today, the Creature bared itself fully, exposing not itself as much as the futility of ideas like Chemical Nova. An advertisement appeared in a newspaper displaying a pair of hands kneading some dough, with the following caption: “Are you allowing your maid to knead atta dough by hand? Her hands may be infected.” The asset encouraged readers of the newspaper to buy Kent’s “atta maker & bread maker” instead, accompanied by a photograph of Hema Malini smiling in approval.

Malini has been the brand ambassador for Kent since 2007 and the incumbent Lok Sabha MP from Mathura since 2014. I’m not sure of the extent to which she knew of the advertisement’s contents before her face (and her daughter’s) appeared on it. Her affiliation since 2004 with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), known for its favouritism towards upper-caste Hindus (to put it mildly), doesn’t inspire confidence but at the same time, it’s quite possible that Malini’s contract with Kent allows the company to include her face in promotional materials for a predefined set of products without requiring prior approval in each instance.

But even if Malini had never been associated with the product or the brand, Chemical Nova would have taken a hit because I had never imagined that the Creature could one day be everywhere at once. The chairman of Kent has since apologised for the advertisement, calling it “unintentional” and “wrongly communicated”. But it seems to me that Kent and the ad agency it hired continue to err because they don’t see the real problem: that they wrote those words down and didn’t immediately cringe, that those words were okayed by many pairs of eyes before they were printed.

The triumph of reason and the immutability of chemical reagents are pointless. The normalisation of exclusion, of creating an ‘other’ who embodies everything the in-group finds undesirable, is not new – but it has for the most part been driven by a top-down impulse that often originates in the offices of Narendra Modi, Amit Shah or some senior BJP minister, and often to distract from some governmental failure. But in the coronavirus pandemic, the act of ‘othering’ seems to have reached community transmission just as fast as the virus may have, finding widespread expression without any ostensible prompt.

And while Kent has been caught out evidently because it was the ‘loudest’, I wonder how many others don’t immediately see that what they are writing, saying, hearing or reading is wrong, and let it pass. As Arundhati Roy wrote earlier this week, the attainment of ‘touchlessness’ seems to be the new normal: in the form of a social condition in which physical distance becomes an excuse to revive and re-normalise untouchabilities that have become taboo – in much the same way soap became subsumed by the enterprise it should have toppled.

Examples already abound, with ministers and corporate uncles alike touting the prescient wisdom of our Hindu ancestors to greet others with a namaste instead of shaking hands; to maintain aachaaram, a collection of gendered practices many of which require the (Brahmin) practitioner to cleanse themselves of ‘spiritual dirt’ through habits and rituals easily incorporated into daily life; and now, to use machines that promise to render, in Roy’s words, “the very bodies of one class … as a biohazard to another”.

It started with a bang, but Chemical Nova slips quietly into the drain, and out of sight, for it is no match for its foe – the Creature called wilful ignorance.

Featured image: A snapshot of William Blake’s ‘The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun’, c. 1805-1810.

That astrology workshop at the IISc

Couple caveats:

I wrote this post on the night of October 28, before the workshop was cancelled on the morning of October 29. I haven’t bothered to change the tense because issuing this caveat at the top seemed simpler.
A highly edited version of this post was published on The Wire on the morning of October 29. It’s about half as long as the post below, so if you’re looking for a TL;DR version, check that out.

A friend of mine forwarded this to me on October 28:

The poster for IIScAA's astrology workshop

I’m sure you can see the story writing itself: “IISc, a bastion of rational thinking and among the last of its kind in India, has capitulated and is set to host a workshop on astrology – a subject Karl Popper considered the prime example of how pseudoscience should be defined – on November 25. The workshop is being organised by the IISc Alumni Association, and will be conducted by M.S. Rameshaiah, who holds a BE in mechanical engineering from IISc and a PG diploma in patents law from NALSAR. He retired as a scientist from the National Aerospace Laboratories.”

But this is an old point. As R. Prasad, the science editor of The Hindu, wrote on his blog, an astrology workshop popping up somewhere in the country was only a matter of time, not possibility. What’s more interesting is why there’s a hullabaloo and who’s raising it. As the friend who forwarded the poster said, “Hope you guys carry this or put some pressure.”

Prasad’s conversation with Rameshaiah moves along the line of why this workshop has been organised – and this is the line many of us (including myself) would assume at first. IISc is one of India’s oldest modern research institutions. It wields considerable clout as a research and academic body among students, researchers and policymakers alike, and it has thus far remained relatively free of political interference. Its own faculty members do good science and are communicative with the media.

So all together, people who regularly preach the scientific temper and who grapple with scientific knowledge as if it existed in a vacuum like to do so on the back of socially important institutions like the IISc. It’s an easy way out to establish dignity – like how part-time writers often use quotable quotes as if they carry some authority.

The problem is, they don’t. And in the same way, it’s not entirely fair to use the IISc as a champion of the idea of success-through-rationalism because it’s an academic and research institution engaged in teaching its students about the sciences, and it doesn’t teach them by exclusion. It doesn’t teach them by describing what is not science but by inculcating what is.

This, as far as I’m concerned, is the primary issue with Rameshaiah’s workshop: calling astrology a “scientific tool” from within an institution that teaches students, and the people at large, about what science is. If it had been called just a “tool”, there wouldn’t have been (much of) a problem. By attaching the prefix of “science”, Rameshaiah is misusing the name of the IISc to bring credibility to his personal beliefs. The secondary issue is whether IISc stands to lose any credibility by association: of course it does.

So there are two distinct issues to be addressed here:

Of an astrology workshop being hosted by the IISc AA, and
Of an astrology workshop in general

The second issue is arguably more interesting because the first issue seems concerned only with chasing an astrology workshop outside the premises of a research institution. And once it is chased out, can we be sure that the same people will be concerned, especially meaningfully, about quelling all astrology workshops everywhere? I’m not so sure.

Of an astrology workshop in general

While the readers of this blog will agree, as I do, that astrology is not a science, can we agree that it is a “tool”? Again, while the readers of this blog will claim that it is a pseudoscience that, in Popper’s (rephrased) words, “destroyed the testability of their theory in order to escape falsification”, it also bears asking why faith in astrology persists in the first place.

Is it because people have not been informed it’s a pseudoscience or is it because there is no record of their religious beliefs – in which one’s faith in astrology is also embedded – having let them down in the last many generations? To put it in Popper’s terms, astrology may not be falsifiable but how many people are concerned with its falsifiability to begin with?

Many people of the community to which I belong believe in astrology. They are Brahmins, quite well to do, ranging in affluence from the upper middle class to the upper class. Many of them have held positions of power and influence, and many of the same people believe that the alignment of the stars in the sky influences their fortunes. Falsifiability is, to them, an intellectual exercise that doesn’t add to their lives. Astrological beliefs and the actions thus inspired, on the other hand, get them through their days and leave them feeling better about themselves.

Where I see Rameshaiah’s workshop inflicting real damage is not among such people, who can afford to lose some of their money and not have to give a damn. Where the problem comes to be is with subaltern communities – from whom astrology has the potential to siphon limited resources and misappropriate their means to ‘status’ mobility (e.g., according to Prasad, Rameshaiah is charging Rs 2,000 per person for the two-day workshop). Additionally, how such beliefs infiltrate these communities is also worth inspecting. For example, astrology is the stranglehold of Brahmins – and to liberate Dalits from the idea that astrology is a valid method of anything is, in a sense, a fight against casteism.

In the Indian socio-economic system, it’s easier to sink to the bottom than to rise to the top. In such a system, rationalism, some principles from the Bhagavad Gita and hope alone won’t cut it if you’re trying to swim upstream simply because of the number of institutional barriers in your way (especially if you’re also of a lower caste). Consider the list of things to which your access is highly limited: education, credit, housing, sanitation, employment, good health, etc. In this scenario, is it any surprise that no one is concerned about falsification as long as it promises a short way out to the upper strata of society?

Ultimately, and in the same vein, what will be more effective in eliminating belief in astrology is not eliminating astrology itself as much as eliminating one’s vulnerability to it. To constantly talk about eradicating beliefs in pseudoscientific ideas from society is to constantly ignore why these ideas take root, to constantly ignore why scientific ideas don’t inspire confidence – or to constantly assume that they do. On the last count, I’m sure many reasons will spring to mind, among them our education, bureaucracy, politics, culture, etc; pseudoscience only exists in their complex overlap.

This is all the more reason to stop fixating on Rameshaiah’s conducting the workshop and divert our attention to who has decided to attend and why. This is not an IISc course; it’s a workshop organised by the institution’s alumni association and as such is not targeted at scientists (in case the question arose as to why would a layperson approach a scientist for astrological advice). In fact, we’re only questioning the presence of an astrology workshop in the midst of a scientific research institution. We’re not questioning why astrology workshops happen in the first place; we must.

Because if you push Rameshaiah down, then someone else like him is going to pop up in a difference place. This is a time when so many of us seem smart enough to ask questions like “What will air filters do when you’re not addressing the source of pollution” or “Why are you blaming women for putting up lists willy-nilly accusing men of sexual harassment when you realise that due process is a myth in many parts of India and reserved for the privileged where it isn’t”. In much the same way, why isn’t it sensible to ask why people believe in astrology instead of going hammer and tongs with falsification?

Featured image credit: geralt/pixabay.

Caste guilt

This is the age of the start-up, not megaliths. Remember T-Rex did not survive evolution. It is unlikely that religions organised like T-Rexes – most of the Abrahamic religions fit this description – will survive an era of fast change.

The T-Rex did evolve in the first place because the evolutionary pathway existed for it to, and what it didn’t survive wasn’t evolution but a meteorite strike. What is only true is that T-Rex-like creatures couldn’t re-emerge after the strike because the evolution of other creatures had moved on and because the world had changed.

The quote above is from a piece on the supposed guilt Hindus have because their spiritual ancestors were the progenitors of casteism in India, by R. Jagannathan in Swarajya. Excerpt:

Put simply, just as it is foolish to blame Africans for giving us AIDS, it is pointless blaming Hinduism for caste, even though this is where it may have originated. Where caste originated should not be a source of perpetual guilt for Hindus. It is now everybody’s problem, not Hinduism’s alone.

I’m not sure if Hindus are blamed because their forefathers did something or because Hindus continue to perpetuate their beliefs, disenfranchise the weaker sections of society and, increasingly today, subject them to majoritarian justice. If anything, I regret that my Hindu forefathers did what they did but I’m certainly neither ashamed nor guilty because of it.

Jagannathan also writes that, like the deras have done to Sikhism, Hinduism should loosen up and allow individual caste groups to function by themselves because this could only benefit the religion.

Hindus are comfortable with caste, and those who want to remain in it should be free to do so. It does not matter if castes become separate religions, retaining only a loose link with Hinduism; it does not matter if groups that are currently identified with Hinduism want to break away, and seek minority, non-Hindu status, as some groups within the Lingayats want to do. If the Ramakrishna Mission wants to be treated as a non-Hindu denomination, why not allow it to do so? It will not actually become less Hindu because of this nomenclature change. In fact, it could become more innovative and grow faster.

From what I’ve understood, one of the biggest ways in which casteism is evil is that it ‘locks in’ its adherents into certain social classes that individuals inherit from generation to generation, and can’t escape easily from. So the only Hindus who “want to remain” within the folds of casteism and who would “be free to do so” are the upper-caste Hindus. This is why the Dera Sacha Sauda flowered – because, to paraphrase Jagannathan, it offered a “casteless” form of Sikhism to Dalits, a ladder to use to climb through social and power structures, increasingly dominated by the upper-caste Jats and Khatris.

In all, the piece is very interesting because of its novel use of metaphors – borrowed from adaptive systems like evolution and capitalism and applied to regressive systems like caste – and because at its heart it seems okay with there being a caste system, just not in the form it’s prevalent at the moment. That’s just wishful thinking because, to those suppressed by their bond with the caste system, being able to live under a more liberal and progressive form of the practice (if such a thing is possible) would be nigh indistinguishable from being liberated altogether.

To understand #NotInMyName

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Shivam Vij published this on June 27. Excerpt:

[Liberals] still romanticise their days at the JNU campus in the ’80s – what an innocent time it was. The still think their marches and slogans will Bring Down Fascism. The people who will march today, feeling self-important about fighting the good fight, don’t understand they are actually helping Hindutva. The more you make a campaign out of Hindutva obsessions – cows, meat, Muslims – these keywords become the central agenda of politics.

Liberals think they can take on Hindutva on its turf and defeat it. That this is not possible should be obvious after the experience since Babri. The only way Hindutva could be defeated is to change the keywords of political discourse from the ones Hindutva wants – cows, meat, Muslims – to the ones it is more apologetic about, such as violence against Dalits, farmers’ agitations, the distress faced by small traders due to demonetisation and GST.

Ashley Tellis rebutted with this on June 28. Excerpt:

[Vij] contradicts himself right off the bat by pointing to the rise of attacks on Muslims since the BJP came to power and then spends the rest of the article telling us that we should not use the word Muslim at all as that is rising to the click-baiting of the BJP. He teaches us that we must give up the words ‘cows, meat and Muslims’ and replace them with ‘Dalit, farmer, small trader.’ It is the stupidest piece of advice ever given by a journalist to anyone. But then, journalists like Vij tend to be the stupidest people around. So perhaps he should take this advice himself and not write articles about protests that according to him have nothing to do with Dalits, farmers and small traders.

I’m coming into this issue as someone who’s not ignorant as much as has embarrassing trouble understanding the syntax and language of such issues. Earlier yesterday, I’d had my doubts about #NotInMyName and asked a friend about them. At first he seemed dismissive (calling my concerns “wooly”) but after some badgering, he answered them one by one (I had nine questions). By not attacking my observations and explaining to me where I was wrong, he has gained an ally (irrespective of how much that means to him or his causes). But how Tellis has replied to Vij I think will make it harder for anyone who is simply looking for answers to take a stronger position in public debates, and to approach him with their doubts.

I realise that Tellis is fully within his rights to call Vij ‘stupid’, as well as that the fight against Hindutva fascists is as sensitive as it is crucial and in which no one will spare anyone else any inches (either in newspaper columns or political estate). I also realise that Vij is an experienced journalist and whose views should have been debated as such (instead of by disparaging all journalistic commentary). For example, by discussing why he sees it fit to make an overly specialised point about strategies when #NotInMyName is really about concerned citizens speaking out against a particularly insidious motivation for murder, as well as the murders themselves, as a collective for the first time. However, a very important intra-communal unity is at stake here: the more vicious public debates we have, the more it will seem like a ‘conversation’ cordoned off to those masses for whom an awareness of social and political issues is only just budding. It places quite the cost on being uninformed (not being ignorant) that those who would like to be informed might not deserve (and it can’t be that everyone’s undeserving of it!). And when this cost is already so high, when the specialised language of the social sciences is already so hard to decipher for an outsider, Tellis’s – and Vij’s and others’ – level of incivility only makes things worse. This isn’t to say Vij wasn’t saying disagreeable things – but only that there’s a way to dismiss them, and how Tellis did it seemed less that and more… spectacle.

As my friend Akhil told me, “To me, the tone and argument of Shivam Vij’s article seems more problematic than Tellis’s response. Of course Tellis could have countered it better than firing off a rant, but who encourages Tellis’s style of writing and who benefits from it explains why such messy debates exist and there’s little we can do about it. Vij wrote a piece lacking substance, but controversial enough to generate traffic, saying things just for the sake of saying things. I’m not sure he wanted a meaningful debate in the first place.And I’m sure Tellis didn’t want a scholarly debate at all because he found the very premise of the arguments ridiculous.” All this also prompts the consideration: Tellis v. Vij, and Tellis v. Rajamani (salvo, return), both played out on the pages of journalism websites (Huffington Post, News Minute and Sify). Should these websites, or any others for that matter, have also been responsible for first introducing the issue (not just as a staid news report like Business Standard did but also in the form of a very important debate playing out between scholars – Vij may not have been one but Rajesh Rajamani and Tellis both are), through which readers could be appraised not just of the overarching narrative of fascists v. liberals but also that of how scholars are choosing to frame – or not frame – their relationship with #NotInMyName? I think so.

More Akhil: “Either we can enjoy lengthy theoretical debates on the internet or physically make our presence felt. A healthy cultural of debate is always desirable, but when the intent is malicious and counterproductive to actual efforts to make things better in such desperate times, it’s difficult to hold back angst in the interest of civility. The onus is of course on the editors of the websites to present the debate in such a manner that serves a more important purpose (to give the audience diverse perspectives) rather than to run clickbait rant that eventually leaves little space for critical engagement.”

My friend’s answers, in case anyone’s interested:

1. Who is the campaign for? Whose attention will the attendees be clamouring for?

For the bulk of Indians (or Hindus, more precisely), whose silence in the face of the BJP’s majoritarianism is providing space for the lynchers and killers.

2. How will (anyone) participating in #NotInMyName help the oppressed minorities?

Oppressed minorities will feel hugely relieved and reassured by a good turnout across the country. I would say the overall size is what will reassure them more than individual names or faces.

3. Doesn’t the name ‘#NotInMyName’ feel more like an abdication than a protest?

The crimes are being committed in the name of ‘nation’, ‘Hinduism’, ‘Bharat mata’, ‘Indian values’, etc., so it is important for people to say, “Sorry, you don’t have exclusive rights to define what is Indian, what is Hindu, what are Hindu values, etc.”

4. Saba Dewan, the filmmaker whose Facebook post snowballed into the #NotInMyName protests, told Business Standard, “We want to convey that whatever is happening in the society is not happening in our name; I do not approve of it.” Why do we presume those who are perpetrating the lynchings care what the urban, upper-class, upper-caste observers think?

Those who are perpetrating may not care but the puppet masters who have created a culture of impunity, who control the police and whose own statements have encouraged the lynch mentality, DO CARE – especially about what the urban, upper-class-upper-caste thinks.

5. Are the campaign’s organisers making any efforts to actively involve minorities in a meaningful way? And is there a way to do this without turning it into a spectacle?

I think the idea is really to ensure Hindus turn out in the largest possible numbers. I suspect people are sending the call to Muslim friends as a kind of solidarity message but to Hindu friends in order to ensure they turn up.

6. The protests are set to be held in 11 cities: New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Trivandrum, Kochi, Patna, Lucknow, London, Toronto. According to an IndiaSpend analysis, cows-related violence since 2014 hasn’t happened in any of these cities but in usually rural areas outside them.

This is a solidarity event so it doesn’t matter where cow-related violence took place.

7. What does the ‘name’ in #NotInMyName stand for? If it denotes religious orders and/or caste, then why does it appear to be an exclusively upper-caste mobilisation?

The Indian upper middle class is largely upper caste so it may appear that this is an upper caste mobilisation, in the same way rallies for LGBTQIA+, FoE, media freedom, etc. issues do.

8. Isn’t there a difference between Muslims using the phrase ‘Not In My Name’ to speak out against ISIS’s brand of Islam, or Americans using it to speak out against their government using their money to fund the War Against Terrorism, and privileged people marching under the banner to decry lynchings perpetrated in the name of preserving the same socio-religious order whose benefits they enjoy?

All of these cases are different. The anti-ISIS protests come from genuine Muslim revulsion against ISIS but also the pressure in Western society for the participants to dissociate from Islamic extremism.

Americans against War on Terror is similar to the Indian protest today, where people in whose name bad things are done (war on terror, attacks on minorities) tell the rulers to STFU. Sure, the rulers can say, “You STFU, you are enjoying the privileges of being American (cheap oil, etc.)” – or Hindu – but that is neither here nor there as an argument.

9. To the people saying “not in my name”: what do you usually lend your name to?

The answer is obvious: just look at the petitions we have carried on The Wire over the past two years by pretty much the same set of folks doing today’s mobilisation: justice for Rohith Vemula, Akhlaq, Pehlu Khan, support of FoE, etc. etc.

Featured image credit: OpenClipart-Vectors/pixabay.

Caste, healthcare and statistics

In late November 2014, the esteemed British medical journal The Lancet published an editorial calling for the end of casteism in India to mitigate the deteriorating health of the millions of rural poor, if nothing else. The central argument was that caste was hampering access to healthcare services. Caste has been blamed for hampering many things. As Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze write in An Uncertain Glory (2014), “… caste continues to be an important instrument of power in Indian society, even where the caste system has lost some of its earlier barbarity and brutality”.

To append healthcare to that list wasn’t a big leap because casteism in India has had a tendency to graduate access to the fundamental rights even. The editorial cites a lecture that the social activist Arundhati Roy gave last year, during which she mentions the example of a doctor who wouldn’t treat a patient because the latter is of a lower caste. At the same time, the appending had to be a controversial leap because it implies that those who are responsible for the ineffectual provision of healthcare services could in some way be ignoring – or even abetting – casteist practices.

Anyway, three responses to the editorial (whose links are available on the same page) provide some clarity on how caste contributes directly and indirectly to the country’s distinct health problems by interfering in unique ways with our class divisions, economic conditions and social inequalities. They can be broadly grouped as age, inheritance and wealth.

1. Age

The first letter argues that the health effects of caste are best diagnosed among older people, who have been exposed to poverty and the effects of caste for a lifetime. Citing this study (PDF), the correspondents write:

The study reported that several health measures, including self-rated overall general health, disability, and presence of a chronic disorder, are similar between scheduled tribes, scheduled castes, Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras in people aged 18–49 years. However, people aged 50 years and older in scheduled tribes and castes were reported as having poorer self-rated health and generally higher levels of disability than those in less impoverished groups, which suggests that the longer the exposure to poverty, the greater the effect on the ageing process.

However, there is an obvious problem in assessing older people and attributing health concerns unique to their age to a single agent. Hindus, who comprise the religious majority in India, traditionally revere their elders. The young are openly expected to ensure that their elders’ economic security and social dignity are not significantly diminished once they retire from full-time employment. Such promises on the other hand are not prevalent in other religious groups. To be sure, that “longer exposure to poverty leads to more health drawbacks” is not entirely flawed but the intensity of its effects may be confounded by traditional values.

2. Inheritance

A paragraph from the second letter reads,

People should only marry within their caste, which can lead to consanguinity. This antiquated tradition has resulted in an unusually high prevalence of specific autosomal recessive diseases in specific community or caste populations, such as diabetes, hypertension, ischaemic heart disease, mental impairments, mental illness, spinocerebellar ataxia, thalassaemia, and sickle-cell diseases.

While increasing literacy rates, especially among the younger age groups, are likely to reduce caste gaps in literacy over this decade, caste seems to have left some population groups with an unenviable inheritance: of the effects of detrimental biological practices. One of the studies the letter’s authors cite provides a p-value of 0.01 for consanguinity being a determinant of diabetic retinopathy (that’s strong evidence). And inter/intra-caste marriages are a prominent feature among caste-based social groups.

3. Wealth

The author of the third piece of correspondence is disappointed that The Lancet saw fit to think dismal healthcare has anything to do with caste, and then adds that the principal determinant across all castes is economic status (on the basis of a 2010 IIPS study). In doing so, two aspects of the caste-healthcare association are thrown up. First, that casteism’s effects are most pronounced on the economic statuses of those victimized by its practice, and that is one way of understanding its effects on access to reliable healthcare. Second, that the statistical knife cuts the other way, too: how do you attribute an effect to caste when it could just as well be due to a failure of some other system?

Three overlooked reasons why India’s healthcare indicators remain abysmal

Scroll.in
January 2, 2015

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led Central government announced in July that it would roll out a National Health Assurance Mission, whose aim would be to provide some free medical services to reduce “out of pocket spending on healthcare by the common man”.

It is thought that the NHAM could be active as early as this month, and could cost $26 billion, according to a senior health official. This is a noble gesture: according to a report on healthcare costs in the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), out-of-pocket expenditure pushed as many as 60 million Indians below the poverty line in 2010.

Going by a Planning Commission report accessed in May, India spends only 1.04% of its GDP on publicly-funded health, while its total health expenditure (public and private) was 4% in 2010-2014. The same report aspired to increase public health spending to 3% of GDP by 2020 and to 4% by 2025. A lot has changed since then, especially when the Narendra Modi government cut down the health spending by $900 million for 2014-2015 citing lack of funds.

Nonetheless, the reason India’s healthcare indicators remain abysmal is not just a question of money (after all, ours is one of the fastest growing economies). The problem is a persistent rash of doublespeak that denies the people a coherent healthcare system. While successive governments have committed to various goals, no government programme has yet focused on the three most important problems facing India’s health at once: a mismanaged regulatory climate, corruption, and the caste system.

1. Contradictory regulations

The problems with regulation are illustrated by India’s medical tourism industry, which according to government sources will be worth Rs 9,500 crore in 2015, and as much as Rs 54,000 crore in 2020. Almost 75% of the medical imaging equipment (worth Rs 18,000 crore in 2011) that services this industry is imported and the value of imports themselves grew at a compounded rate of 16% in 2010-2014.

There is an import duty on fully-finished devices to the tune of 10%, whose cost is transferred to consumers. It gets better here: if device components are imported individually and then assembled in India, there is an additional excise duty and VAT, increasing the device cost. This tax suppresses domestic manufacturing of diagnostic equipment and the import-intensive economy it fosters continues to inflate healthcare costs in a country where only 30% of healthcare is publicly funded.

It has also led to a chicken-and-egg squabble between medical advocacy groups in the country. For example, ahead of the presentation of the Union Budget in 2010, the Department of Pharmaceuticals sought a cut in the customs duty to facilitate imports, while the Association of Indian Medical Devices Industry sought a hike to promote domestic innovation.

The report that claimed out-of-pocket expenses had pushed 60 million people below the poverty line also found that urban centres were the primary users of sophisticated medical equipment even as the per capita expenditure on medical technology in the country was a frugal $2 to $2.5.

2. Corruption and Inefficiency

A part of the problem is corruption and inefficiency. There is no national body to oversee the procurement and provision of generic medicine, which currently originates from local manufacturers known to operate their plants in unsanitary conditions. On April 7, the day Sun Pharma announced that it would fully acquire Ranbaxy Labs, Wockhardt publicly acknowledged that its plant in Aurangabad had been found to contain urine and mould in the vicinity of testing samples during an inspection by the US Food and Drug Administration.

All three companies now are disallowed from exporting certain drugs to the US and Europe. The reason they are allowed to release their drugs in the domestic market is because there is a demand for generic drugs and because there are about 1,500 health inspectors for more than 10,000 factories in the country, resulting in one in every 22 locally-produced samples being of substandard quality. In Tamil Nadu alone, 4,000 health inspector positions remained vacant in 2012.

Moreover, public healthcare professionals are not up to the mark. As the recent Chhattisgarh sterilisation camp tragedy illustrated, medical camps are often understaffed by ill-equipped doctors and technicians. One surgeon at the Chhattisgarh camp reportedly performed 83 tubectomies in six hours. In Odisha, cycle pumps were used to dilate the cervices of some women in a sterilisation camp.

Data from the Ministry for Health and Family Welfare shows that, since 2008, 700 people have died after going through government-sponsored sterilisation programmes.

3. Caste system

What exacerbates all these issues is the social setting their providers and users are situated in, and the caste system in that setting. On November 20, Arundhati Roy gave a lecture at the University College London, titled “The half-life of caste: The ill-health of a nation”. She started by saying, “We are still a society where a public health worker will refuse to touch children who are ill because they are untouchable. There are doctors who refuse to do a post-mortem because it’s polluting to touch” a dead body.

She argued in the lecture that the notions of purity and pollution that casteism enshrines, whose persistence M K Gandhi secured by institutionalising them during the freedom struggle, often deter good health practices, especially among poor women and children and those belonging to the lower castes. As the chart below shows, India’s infant and maternal mortality rates are worse than those of its neighbouring countries and BRICS nations.

1418035383-447_Mortality-rates-2013-IMR-MMR-chartbuilder

As the British medical journal The Lancet wrote in an editorial on November 29, “This ingrained inequality has led to tacit acceptance of the caste system, which has created, among other challenges, a preventable epidemic of mortality among women and children.” In effect, irrespective of what changes are instituted at the top, they will not reach the masses if access to healthcare and medical services remains segregated by caste.

These three hurdles are further compounded by successive governments’ tendencies to confusion. On one hand, Prime Minister Narendra Modi promises more All India Institute Of Medical Science in the country and on the other cuts the health budget by $900 million. The United Progressive Alliance government before him managed to eradicate polio but let that pursuit overshadow that of full-immunisation, the rate of which has fallen in developed states like Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Haryana and Punjab.

Such equivocal measures are the product of the thinking that health is purely a biological concern, not influenced by understaffed training institutions, overzealous eradication drives, import-friendly regulations, inexplicable shortage of health inspectors or segregation by caste.