Meera Nanda’s A Field Guide to Post-Truth India is a timely contribution to understanding the complex transformative political and cultural processes that have taken place in the country since 2014 which finally saw the emergence of a majoritarian state. The Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentors have been able to influence and control various government branches and institutions of the state including the media and the judiciary in establishing a Hinduist ethno-religious suzerainty over a constitutionally secular Republic.
Those who resist this project are silenced using strong-arm methods and dissenters are often branded as ‘enemies of the state’. The cultural policing by vigilante groups is unleashed to force, via violence, their moral codes on others who follow different systems of religious faith or belief systems. Nanda, one of the influential contemporary social thinkers, in her latest book, addresses how this dramatic turn of events picked up momentum during the last decade and analyses how the proponents of Hindutva have been successful in social conditioning the Indian masses by relativisation of truth to restructure the original idea of a secular, inclusive and pluralistic India.
Meera Nanda,
A Field Guide to Post-Truth India,
Three Essays Collective (2024).
By knowledge distortion, parading misinformation and outright lies, the Hindutva exponents were able to generate a narrative that glorified the past and legitimised dubious claims in the scriptures as genuine science. Thus, with myth substituting history, the entire worldview of the sponsors of the Hindu Rashtra impinges on re-creating a mythical past which is not amenable to standard testing methods.
Nanda takes an analytical approach to unravel the basics of the Hindu far-right playbook of social engineering that aims at refashioning the public mind through manipulating the truth and spreading disinformation. She observes that post-secular India is fast changing into a post-truth society, cheered and supported by a tail-wagging mainstream media. Besides conventional platforms, the explosion of internet-based media, with its wide reach, has become a very effective tool for disseminating untruths and “big lies” manufactured for mass consumption.
The British Oxford Dictionary defines “post-truth” as: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. As the author says, “post-truth is the triumph of the visceral over the rational”, somewhat aligning with American professor Noam Chomsky’s characterisation of such a messaging technique as, “short-circuiting citizens’ critical and analytical senses”.
In the Hindutva playbook, the basic norms of independent India – secularism and liberalism came to be regarded as a part of a conspiracy hatched by the Western-educated elites with the sole aim of controlling and dominating the Hindu majority. According to their interpretation of history, the Hindu victimhood goes back in time to when the Mughals and their predecessors were in power in north India. Such an interpretation of the past with communal overtones will not hold up against historical facts. The country truly became a colony during British rule and not under the Mughals – a view that aligns with what Gandhi had said about slavery. He described it as the “slavery of evil customs and superstitions” among the Hindus that prevailed in pre-British India.
The ‘field guide’ begins with a discussion on how a post-truth milieu took firm roots in India under the Modi regime, comparable in many aspects to the United States under former President Donald Trump, whom Nanda describes as a “bullshitter’ than a liar. A liar is someone conscious of hiding the truth, but a bullshitter is “indifferent to the whole business of truth” and a policy of sorts that is being developed as a successful election strategy. An Indian equivalent of Trump’s ‘Big Lie’ is the myth of the Muslim population explosion which goes against every bit of real data. This big lie is being propagated as if to transport the gullible Hindu population to a la-la land where the conspiracy theories reign – that the foreign and anti-national forces are hatching a conspiracy and are determined to bring about a demographic change so that the Hindus become a minority in their ‘own’ country. The objective of the owners of the lie factory is clear – to generate ethnic cleavages and social polarisation.
Hindutva’s proponents have been particularly effective in peddling pseudoscience and bringing its status to be at par with evidence-based modern science. By successfully branding Hindu scriptural epistemology as ‘Indian Knowledge Systems’, they have been able to make it a part of the educational syllabus, legitimising Hindu metaphysics and mythology as science and history.
In a chapter titled Defending Tradition, Defying Science, the author exposes the ruling regime’s zealous promotion of Ayurveda – a traditional medicinal practice bandied as a jewel in the ancient Indian Knowledge System. As if waiting for an appropriate opportunity, the Ministry of Ayush used the COVID-19 pandemic to issue an advisory recommending ayurvedic, homeopathic and Unani decoctions for preventing and treating the disease. A later advisory confirmed the evidence for the effectiveness of these formulations. Nanda provides us with a complete timeline of how the Union government moved to foster Ayurveda as a cure for COVID-19 and how brand ambassadors like Ramdev and his multi-crore company, Patanjali, entered the fray, hoodwinking the people on the questionable efficacy of his Ayurvedic antiviral pill. Nanda asks why AYUSH forgot the first principle of medicine – ‘to do no harm’, while sponsoring such remedies that are not backed by robust science.
The fifth chapter of the book that critically analyses ‘yogic perception’, elaborated in Patanjali Yoga Sutra, should be read as an extension of the chapter on Ayurveda. The author points out that two elements of Yoga Sutras – to see empirical realities through non-sensory means and to acquire magical powers, including immortality, through herbs, have influenced both the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita, the foundational texts in Ayurveda.
These factors limit the scope of Ayurveda as a scientific discipline, and falsifiability – a deductive standard of evaluation in modern science – cannot be applied here, as no experimental or observational evidence for the claims is documented in Ayurvedic texts. Scientific studies establish that the Indian herbs or their extracts recommended by Ayurveda, such as Ashwagandha, Aloe vera, Guggul, Puncture vine, Turmeric, Gotu-kola, Bakuchi, Senna, Noni, Malabar tamarind, and Gurmar, have been associated with various types of liver toxicity and injury – some of which were ingredients of drugs approved by AYUSH.
Though there is a rethinking on the safety of such herbal decoctions, this writer is intrigued to read an article by chairman of the University Grants Commission M. Jagadesh Kumar, discussing the strengths of IKS and justifying its incorporation into educational programmes. He writes, “Ayurveda, the ancient Indian system of medicine, has been subject to numerous scientific studies. Ayurveda offers holistic approaches to healthcare that emphasise preventive care, lifestyle modifications, and personalised treatment strategies”. Why did he fail in his professional duty as a scientist to mention the results of the tests proving the toxicity of the Ayurvedic medicines? As the expression goes, “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
In another chapter, Nanda examines how modern science has been used as the handmaiden of Hindu nationalism, thanks primarily to Swami Vivekananda, who declared in the Chicago address (1893) that “The latest conclusions of science echo the Vedantic philosophy… that the Hindu has been cherishing in his bosom for ages.” Nanda convincingly explains how Hindu thinkers like Vivekananda or Dayananda Saraswati who were living under colonialism had to find ways, as she puts it, to “defend their own civilisation against the condescension and scorn of their colonial overlords and Christian missionaries, while simultaneously embracing the sciences and social ideals of Western Provenance”. This is a case where history plays a recurring role in the present, and as she says, “the contemporary Vedic science reenacting the strategies of strategic inclusivism of modern science into Vedic canon…”
Charles Darwin has been a punching bag for religious fundamentalists around the world since the publication of his magnum opus On the Origin of Species in 1859. In a chapter titled, “India’s Long Goodbye to Darwin”, Nanda explains how Dayananda Saraswati’s Vedic creationism and Advaitic evolutionism propounded by Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo were developed as Hindu versions of Christian creationism. The decision of the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) in July 2022 to block the theory of biological evolution from the Class 10 syllabus is not a random event, but a well-thought-out attempt at the Hindui-sation of education. Nanda calls this a “silent coup”, against secular education, conducted through the recently promulgated “National Education Policy, which has pushed the secular Indian education system to embrace faith-based superstitions and pseudoscience. One can find a similar resonance in the demand of the Christian nationalists in the US to introduce intelligent design creationism in high schools.
The author also discusses the hollowness of the Hindu supremacist argument of the Indus Civilisation as a Vedic Aryan civilisation. The yearly calendars published by the Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge Systems at IIT-Kharagpur are used as propaganda tools carrying misinformation on India’s protohistory. These calendars use a misrepresented mixture of symbols and images to advance an account of Hindu ancestry based on a false premise that the Vedic Aryans were indigenous to the Indus Valley region, and by extending to the west, this became the progenitor of the culture worldwide. The ‘out-of-India’ theory flies in the face of all the available evidence generated by a spectrum of recent scientific and sociological studies.
Defending the truth in a post-truth world is not an easy proposition where the formal carriers of truth have either been muzzled or bought over. With the hint of a Marxian parody, Nanda ends her book with a caution: “The majoritarian state is no longer a mere specter, it is already a reality….and it is imperative for intellectuals to not merely to interpret the world they live in, but to intervene in order to change it.” What is perplexing is the fact there is very little country-wide resistance from the university and academic circles, barring some isolated valiant voices, against the post-truth assault on objective truths, science, academic freedom and democracy. Unfortunately, many of them, by being silent, are acting like willing enablers of the destruction of democracy and freedom to think, write and ask questions.
An authoritative account of a post-truth India, this book fills a yawning gap in intellectual resistance, by unravelling the nuts and bolts of the strategies followed in setting the stage for the Hinduisation of the public sphere. The state which is constitutionally obliged to uphold the centrality of scientific temper, essential for sustaining a democratic secular Republic, is now actively participating to turn the clock back by legitimising pseudoscience and outdated metaphysics. Our nation is on the precipice of change and the backers of a supremacist ideology are working overtime on a project of remaking a country and its fundamental ethos. ‘The flame of enlightenment is waning’, a journalist once said to German novelist Günter Grass, “But”, he replied, “there is no other source of light”. As readers, we must thank Nanda for keeping the fire burning despite strong headwinds.
C.P. Rajendran is a geoscientist and a communicator on science policies, environment and education.
