Tag: Patanjali Ayurved

Justice delayed but a ton of bricks await

From ‘SC declines Ramdev, Patanjali apology; expresses concern over FMCGs taking gullible consumers ‘up and down the garden path’’, The Hindu, April 10, 2024:

The Supreme Court has refused to accept the unconditional apology from Patanjali co-founder Baba Ramdev and managing director Acharya Balkrishna for advertising medical products in violation of giving an undertaking in the apex court in November 2023 prohibiting the self-styled yoga guru. … Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah told senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi that Mr. Ramdev has apologised only after being caught on the back foot. His violations of the undertaking to the court was deliberate and willful, they said. The SC recorded its dissatisfaction with the apology tendered by proposed contemnors Patanjali, Mr. Balkrishna and Mr. Ramdev, and posted the contempt of court case on April 16.

… The Bench also turned its ire on the Uttarakhand State Licensing Authority for “twiddling their thumbs” and doing nothing to prevent the publications and advertisements. “Why should we not come down like a ton of bricks on your officers? They have been fillibustering,” Justice Kohli said. The court said the assurances of the State Licensing Authority and the apology of the proposed contemnors are not worth the paper they are written on.

A very emotionally gratifying turn of events, but perhaps not as gratifying as they might have been had they transpired at the government’s hands when Patanjali was issuing its advertisements of pseudoscience-backed COVID-19 cures during the pandemic. Or if the Supreme Court had proceeded to actually hold the men in contempt instead of making a slew of observations and setting a date for another hearing. Still, something to cheer for and occasion to reserve some hope for the April 16 session.

But in matters involving Ramdev and Patanjali Ayurved, many ministers of the current government ought to be pulled up as well, including former Union health minister Harsh Vardhan, Union micro, small, and medium enterprises minister Nitin Gadkari, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Modi’s governance and policies both written and unwritten enabled Patanjali’s charlatanry while messrs Vardhan and Gadkari were present at an event in February 2021 when Patanjali launched a product it claimed could cure COVID-19, with Vardhan – who was health minister then – speaking in favour of people buying and using the unproven thing.

I think the Supreme Court’s inclination to hold Ramdev et al. in contempt should extend to Vardhan as well because his presence at the event conferred a sheen of legitimacy on the product but also because of a specific bit of theatrics he pulled in May the same year involving Ramdev and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Ramdev apologising because that’s more politically convenient rather than because he thinks he screwed up isn’t new. In that May, he’d called evidence-based medicine “stupid” and alleged such medicine had killed more people than the virus itself. After some virulent public backlash, Vardhan wrote a really polite letter to Ramdev asking him to apologise, and Ramdev obliged.

But just the previous month, in April 2021, Manmohan Singh had written a letter to Modi suggesting a few courses of action to improve India’s response to the virus’s spread. Its contents were perfectly reasonable, yet Vardhan responded to it accusing Singh of spreading “vaccine hesitancy” and alleging Congress-ruled states were responsible for fanning India’s deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections (in 2021). These were all ridiculous assertions. But equally importantly, his lashing out stood in stark contrast to his letter to Ramdev: respect for the self-styled godman and businessman whose company was attempting to corner the market for COVID-19 cures with untested, pseudo-Ayurvedic froth versus unhinged rhetoric for a well-regarded economist and statesman.

For this alone, Vardhan deserves the “ton of bricks” the Supreme Court is waiting with.

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.

Anti-softening science for the state

The group of ministers (GoM) report on “government communication” has recommended that the government promote “soft topics” in the media like “yoga” and “tigers”. We can only speculate what this means, and that shouldn’t be hard. The overall spirit of the document is insecurity and paranoia, manifested as fantasies of reining in the country’s independent media into doing the government’s bidding. The promotion of “soft” stories is in line with this aspiration – “soft” here can only mean stories that don’t criticise the government, its actions or policies, and be like ‘harmless entertainment’ for a politically inert audience. It’s also no coincidence that the two examples on offer of such stories skirt the edges of health and environmental journalism; other examples are sure to include reports of scientific discoveries.

Science is closely related to the Indian state in many ways. The current government in particular, in power since 2014, has been promoting application-oriented R&D (a bias especially visible in budgetary allocations); encouraging ill-prepared research facilities to self-finance; privileging certain private interests (esp. the Reliance and Adani groups) vis-à-vis natural resources like coal, coastal zones and spectrum allocations; pillaging India’s ecological commons for industrialisation; promoting pseudoscience (which further disempowers those closer to society’s margins); interfering at universities by appointing vice-chancellors friendly to the ruling party (and if that doesn’t work, jailing students on ridiculous charges that include dissent); curtailing academic freedom; and hounding after scientists and institutions that threaten its preferred narratives.

With this in mind, it’s important for science journalism outlets and science journalists to not become complicit – inadvertently or otherwise – in the state project to “soften” science, and start reporting, if they aren’t already, on issues with a closer eye on their repercussions on the wider society. The idea that science journalism can or should be objective the way science is is nonsensical because the idea that science is an objective enterprise is nonsensical. The scientific method is a technique to obtain information about the natural universe while steadily subtracting the influence of human biases and other limitations. However, what scientists choose to study, how they design their studies and what is ultimately construed to be knowledge are all deeply human enterprises.

On top of this, science journalism is driven by journalists’ sense of good and bad: We write favourably about the former and argue against the latter. We write about some telescope unravelling a long-standing cosmogonic problem and also publish an article calling out homeopathy’s bullshit. We write a scientific paper that uses ingenious methods to prove its point and also call out Indian academia as an unsafe space for queer-trans people.

Some have advanced a defence that simply focusing on “good science” can inculcate in the audience a sense of what is “worthy” and “desirable” while denying “bad science” the platform and publicity it seeks. This is objectionable on two counts.

First, who decides what is “worthy”? For example, some scientists, especially in the ‘senior’ cadre and the more influential and/or powerful for it, make this choice by deferring to the wisdom of scientific journals, chosen according to their impact factors, and what the journals have deemed worthy of publishing. But abiding by this heuristic only means we continue to participate in and extend the lifetime of the existing ways of knowledge production that privilege white scientists, male scientists and richer scientists – and sensational positive results on topics that the scientists staffing the journals’ editorial boards would like to focus on.

Second, being limited to goodness at a time when badness abounds is bad, at least severely tone-deaf (but I’m disinclined to be so charitable). Very broadly, that science is inherently amoral is a pithy factoid by this point. There have been far too many incidents in history for anyone to still be able to overlook, in good faith, the fact that science’s prescriptions unguided by human morals and values are quite likely to lead to humanitarian disasters. We may even be living through one such. Scientists’ rapid and successful development of new vaccines against a new pathogen was followed by a global rush to acquire enough doses. But the world’s industrial and economic powers have ensured that the strongest among them have enough to vaccine their entire populations more than once, have blocked petitions at global fora to loosen patents on these vaccines to expand manufacturing and distribution, have forced desperate countries to purchase doses at prices higher than those for developed blocs like the EU, and have allowed corporate behemoths to make monumental profits even as they force third-world nations to pledge sovereign assets to secure supplies. It’s fallacious to claim scientific labour makes the world a better place when the fruits of such labour must still be filtered, like so much else, through the capitalist sieve.

There are many questions for the science journalist to consider here: why have some communities in certain countries been affected more than others? Why is there so little data on the vaccines’ consequences for pregnant women? Do we know enough to discuss the pandemic’s effects on women? Why, at a time when so many scientists and engineers were working to design new ventilators, was there no unified standard to ensure usability? If the world has demonstrated that it’s possible to design, test, manufacture and administer vaccines against a new virus in such a short time, why have we been waiting so long for effective defences against neglected tropical diseases? How do the racial, gender and ethnic identifies of clinical trials affect trial outcomes? Is it ethical for countries that hosted vaccine clinical trials to get the first doses? Should we compulsorily prohibit patents on drugs, therapies and devices important to ending pandemics? If so, what might the consequences be for drug development? And what good is a vaccine if we can’t also ensure all the world’s 7.x billion people can be vaccinated simultaneously?

The pandemic isn’t a particularly ‘easy’ example either. For example, if the government promises to develop new supercomputers, who can use them and what problems will they be used to solve? How can we improve the quality and quantity of research conducted at institutes funded by state governments? Why do so many scientists at public universities plagiarise scientific papers? On what basis are the winners of the S.S. Bhatnagar Award chosen? Should we formally do away with subscription-funded scientific journals in favour of open-access publishing, overlay journals and post-publication peer-review? Is methane really a “clean fuel” even though its extraction and transportation will impose a considerable dirty cost? Why can’t we have more GM foods in the market even though the science is ‘good’? Is it worthwhile to invest Rs 10,000 crore in a human spaceflight programme that lacks long-term vision? And so forth.

Simply focusing on “good science” at our present time is not enough. I also reject the argument that it’s not for science journalists to protect or defend science simply because science, whatever it’s interpreted to mean, is not the preserve of scientists. As an enterprise rooted in its famous method, science is a tool of empowerment: it encourages discovery and deliberation; I’m not sure if it’s fair to say it encourages dissent as well but there is evidence that science can accommodate it without resorting to violence and subjugation.

It’s not for nothing that I’m more comfortable holding up an aspirin tablet for someone with a headache than a jar of leaves from the Patanjali Ayurved stable: being able to know how and why something works is power in the same way knowing how the pharmaceutical industry manipulates markets, how to file an RTI application, what makes an FIR valid or invalid, what the election commission’s model code of conduct stipulates or what kind of land a mall can be built on is power. All of it represents control, especially the ability to say ‘no’ and mean it.

This is ultimately what the GoM report fantasises about – and what the present government desires: the annulment of individual and institutional resistance, one subset of which is the neutralisation of science’s ability to provoke questions about atoms and black holes as much as about the circumstances in which scientists study them, about the nature, utility and purpose of knowledge, and the relationships between science, capital and the state.

Addendum

In January 2020, the Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser (PSA) to the Government of India organised a meeting with science journalists and communicators from around the country to discuss what the two parties could do for each other. Us journalists and communicators aired a lot of grievances during the meeting as well as suggestions on fixing long-standing and/or particularly thorny problems (some notes here).

In light of the government’s renewed attention on curbing press freedom and ludicrous suggestions in the report, such as one by S. Gurumurthy that the news should be a “mixture of truth and untruth”, I’m not sure where that leaves the PSA’s plans for future consultation nor – considering parts of the report seemingly manufactured consent – whether good-faith consultation will be possible going ahead. I can only hope that members of this community at least evoke and keep the faith.

The government’s enblightenment

The GMO debate is a fascinating object, even though participating in it often amounts to nothing but pain, frustration and lost time – especially if you’re pro-GMO foods. It’s fascinating because it’s one of a kind: one party has science on its side but little else, including good science outreach, and the other has sociology but also lots of overreaching rhetoric. There is also an unseen foe, the agrochemical company Monsanto, whose decades of indulgence in unethical practices and corporate recalcitrance to promote the sales of its fertilisers and genetically modified seeds have blighted the soil – both literally and figuratively – rendering hundreds of thousands of people around the world forever suspicious of genetic engineering vis-à-vis agriculture. One prominent outcome of this ‘enblightenment’ is that scientifically robust data no longer suffices to qualify GM products for regulatory approval, and any such approval, once granted, becomes automatically subsumed by doubts about corruption and subversion. Another outcome is the pall of cynicism that hangs over any public deliberations of GM products, especially regarding business practices – cynicism that effectively holds a gap open for unscientific, even pseudoscientific, arguments to slip into the debate and for untenable rhetorical methods, especially whataboutery, to find more purchase than might be warranted. Taken together, I think these are some reasons why the GMO debate has lasted for so long and why settling it to the effect of everyone being more accepting of GM seeds is going to be very hard.

It would seem some of these features are also visible, or are becoming apparent, on a different front. Baba Ramdev’s (I suspect) pseudo-Ayurvedic company Patanjali Ayurved has come under fire for falsely claiming an antiviral drug it has minted, called Coronil, was approved by the WHO for use against COVID-19. The WHO hasn’t granted any such approval – and the study backing up Coronil’s efficacy doesn’t seem to hold up to deeper scrutiny either. However, Patanjali Ayurved has stood its ground, most recently lashing out against the Indian Medical Association (IMA) for calling Coronil’s public launch on February 19, with Union health minister Harsh Vardhan in attendance as an honoured guest, despite its dubious credentials was “a slap and insult to the people of the country”. A spokesperson for Patanjali, S.K. Tijarawala, tweeted the company’s rebuttal on February 25, asking the IMA to focus on availing the people of India more affordable healthcare first and to abolish the practice of “commissions in the medical profession”. This is plain whataboutery – responding to one argument with another while also changing the topic. However, this counterargument is also likely to stick because access to affordable and good quality healthcare and over-charging in private clinics and hospitals are both big and rampant problems in India, thanks to the oversight of successive governments and the privatising tendencies of the current one. And even though Patanjali is resorting to whataboutery to advance this accusation, the issues’ shared relevance is likely to be able to hold the door open for someone – a minister, a political leader, a prominent doctor, anyone – to legitimise the contention, in much the same way Monsanto mass-poisoned the public impression of GMOs, thus allowing otherwise untenable anti-GMO arguments to survive for longer in conversation. Humming quietly in the background is of course the government’s profitable hypocrisy: of doing nothing to ensure the problems Patanjali is using to hide from the IMA’s complaint go away, dispatching two of its senior ministers to endorse Patanjali’s products despite the near-complete absence of reason in its ‘approval’ by the government, and allowing Patanjali to justify Coronil’s existence by offering it – in vague and therefore irrefutable terms – as a potential solution for India’s ‘access to healthcare’ problems.