Tag: Jitendra Singh

A lotus for Modi, with love from Manipur

This bit of news is so chock full of metaphors that I’m almost laughing out loud. Annotated excerpts from ‘CSIR’s new lotus variety ‘Namoh 108’ a ‘grand gift’ to PM Modi: Science Minister‘, The Hindu, August 19, 2023:

It’s a triviality today that the Indian government ministers’ relentless exaltation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not spontaneity so much as an orchestrated thing to keep his name in the news without him having to interact with the press, and to constantly reinforce the impression that Modi is doing great work. And this “Namoh 108” drives home how the political leadership of the scientific enterprise has been pressed to this task.

Also, Jitendra Singh hasn’t been much of a science minister: almost since the day he took charge of this ministry, he has been praising his master in almost every public utterance and speech. Meanwhile, the expenditure on science and research by the government he’s part of has fallen, pseudoscience is occupying more space in several spheres (including at the IITs), and research scholars continue to have a tough time doing their work.

As likely as the flower’s discovery many years ago in Manipur is a coincidence vis-à-vis the violence underway in the northeastern state, it’s just as hard to believe government officials are not speaking up about it now to catapult it into the news – to highlight something else more benign about Manipur and to give it a BJP connection as well: the lotus has 108 petals and the party symbol is a lotus.

(Also, this is the second connection in recent times between northeast India and India as a whole in terms of the state seeing value in a botanical resource, and proceeding to extract and exploit it. In 2007, researchers found the then-spiciest chilli variety in India’s northeast. By 2010, DRDO had found a way to pack it into grenades. In 2016, a Centre-appointed committee considered these grenades as alternatives to the use of pellet guns in the Kashmir Valley.)

It seems we’re sequencing the genomes of and conducting more detailed study of only those flowers that have a Hindu number of petals. Woe betide those that have 107, 109 or even a dozen, no matter that – short of the 108 petals conferring a specific benefit to the lotus plant (apparently not the case) – this is an accident of nature. Against the backdrop of the Nagoya Protocol, the Kunming-Montreal pact, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and issues of access and benefit sharing, India – and all other countries – should be striving to study (genetically and otherwise) and index all the different biological resources available within their borders. But we’re not. We’re only interested in flowers with 108 petals.

Good luck to children who will be expected to draw this in classrooms. Good luck also to other lotuses.

I’m quite certain that someone in that meeting would have coughed, sneezed, burped, farted or sniffed before that individual said “Om Namaha Vasudeva” out loud. I’m also sure that, en route to the meeting, and aware of its agenda, the attendees would have heard someone retching, hacking or spitting. “Kkrkrkrkrkrhrhrhrhrhrhrthphoooo 108” is more memorable, no?

So there was a naming committee! I’ll bet 10 rupees that after this committee came up with “Namoh”, it handed the note to Singh, added the footnote about its imperfect resemblance to “Namo”, and asked for brownie points.

‘Aatmanirbharta through science’

The Week magazine distinguished itself last year by picking Indian Council of Medical Research chief Balram Bhargava as its ‘person of the year’ for 2021. And now, ahead of National Science Day tomorrow, The Week has conducted an “exclusive” interview with science minister Jitendra Singh. Long Small story short, it’s rubbish.

I discovered the term ‘Gish gallop’ in a 2013 blog post by David Gorsky, in which he wrote about the danger of acquiescing to cranks’ request for experts to debate them on a public stage. While such invitations may appear to legitimate experts to be an opportunity to settle the matter once and for all, it never works that way: the stage and the debate become platforms on which the cranks can spew their bullshit, in the name of having the right in the limited context of the event to do so, and use the inevitably imperfect rebuttal – limited by time and other resources – as a way to legitimise some or all of their claims. (Also read in this context: ‘No, I Will Not Debate You’.)

One particular tactic to which cranks resort in these circumstances is, Gorsky wrote, “to Gish gallop”: to flood their rhetoric with new terms, claims, arguments, etc. with little regard for their relevance or accuracy, in an effort to inundate their opponents with too many points on which to push back.

In their ‘interview’, with the help of kowtowing questions and zero push-back, The Week has allowed Jitendra Singh to Gish gallop. In this case, however, instead of Singh drawing credibility from his ‘opponent’ being an expert who couldn’t effectively refute his contentions, he derives his upper-hand from his interlocutor being a well-known, once-reputed magazine, and secretly from its (possibly enforced) supinity.

The penultimate question is the best, to me: “Yet, India’s good work gets shadowed by pseudoscience utterances. Somehow, your government has not been able to quieten the mumbo jumbo.” Dear interviewer, the government itself is the origin of a lot of the mumbo jumbo. Any question that isn’t founded on that truth will always ignore the problem, and will not elicit a solution.

Overall, the interview is a press release worded in the form of a Q&A, with a healthy chance that the opportunity to publish it was dangled in front of The Week in exchange for soft questions. Yet its headline may be accurate in a way the magazine didn’t intend: this government is going to achieve its mythical goal of perfect ‘Aatmanirbharta’ only by boring a hole through science, and reason and common sense.

Happy national science day!

Featured image: Jitendra Singh, May 2014. Photo edited (see original here). Credit: Press Information Bureau/GoI, GODL – India.