Since the formation ‘Hindutva theory’ and post-colonial endeavour to theorise Hindutva in a Unitarian way, there is an attempt to hijack and reshape the nation’s history. It is not an exclusive endeavour made by the Sangha Parviar, rather this attempt predates their origin. The subaltern historians very famously delved out the mythological history being written under the initial days of British colonialism that portrayed the history of Indian subcontinent entangling it entirely with dominant Brahminic mythology. The documentation of history in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Kolkata as a linear story beginning with Rama as the undisputed sovereign of the land to the British-Raj, the ‘Javan-killing’ emancipators, is something that RSS did not come up with. It is one of the narratives that resided in the savarna consciousness in one dormant format or the other. All it took to come out was the leverage from the new colonial masters.

Following the independence and a huge push-back, not only from Nehruvian socialism and its projected ‘scientific temper,’ but from the Dalit movements and partial empowerment of the ones who previously remained on the lower rungs of history, the project of history-rehashing became dormant, somewhat underground, yet its roots never truly were eradicated and now, we only have begun to see, the germination of newer seeds from the same old tree.

Rewriting of history, however, is not the only aspect of the story. To put it in another way, history is not the only victim of this conniving act. Science and scientific education, which was the central theme of the decade old conference, is something that is equally affected through this slight of hands. How the environment of free inquiry and open questioning is going to come under assault is something the scientific community of our developing nation is still trying to figure out as some of the prominent scientific minds like Dr. Mayank Vahia have recently conveyed. But it is more obvious who might be even larger a victim: the basic scientific education.

There is an apocryphal story about Sir Arthur Eddington, the eminent English mathematician who designed the experiment to test the validity of Einstein’s Special theory of relativity. “Professor Eddington,” he was asked by one of his renowned colleagues, “is it true that there is only three people in the world who understands Einstein’s theory?” After remaining silent for a while, when he was goaded for a reply, he said, “Oh, no! I was wondering who the third one might be!”

Eddington’s story, in a way, reflects the common feature of the so-called modern day ‘hard science’, how removed it is from the popular consciousness, how distant it is from common mass’s ability to comprehend the mechanism of things, how counterintuitive it has become and is becoming on an everyday level. And hence, in spite of thousands of popular science shows and books, hundreds of people devoting all their time to uplift the scientific knowledge and consciousness of the populace, the general scientific literacy remains disastrously miserable.

And this is what is required to give science the aura of, not only unknown, but unknowable. It is a common practise among the religious charlatans of the West to take the average scientific uncertainty and try to create uncertainty about the entire scientific process in the minds of the average scientifically illiterate audience. Almost the same mechanism is at work here in India, only at the reverse order. Scientific jargons, ill-understood by the commoner, is taken and moulded into something apparently ludicrous and yet truly appealing to a commoner. In order to reinforce the prejudice of historical superiority and being the descendant of a master race, science and history of science is being used as a distant myth!

The right-wing Hindutvavadis should, and hopefully, would face innumerable scathing criticism over this distortion. But this phenomenon is a tell-tale sign of something very ominous: the ineptitude of science education of our country. We must bear in mind that the appeal of the story of a fabricated golden past is not towards the poorest of poors, but rather to the so-called educated middle-class and working class who were taught about science, through the Neveruvian state establishments, so ineptly and so disastrously that their knowledge borders on non-existence. That is because the colonial hang-over of pedantic way of teaching could not dissociate teaching of science from teaching of religion. Students of high school to universities, acting as the passive vessels of knowledge, disseminated by a few not-so-certain teachers, in a shrine-like classroom, being taught about the stories fall of apple on the head of a white man on a distant land never made any difference from the story of a war between hundred brothers against five. And this implicit indiscrimination is on us.

Unless the pace of education moulds into the modernity, unless we do learn the methodology of teaching and doing science not by aping but by evolving, our future remains in dire pessimism. (IPA Service)