جمہوریت اور رائے شماری کے موجودہ سیاسی ماحول میں اب حاکم و محکوم کا تصور نہیں رہا ہے۔ ہر ملک کے شہری اپنے عقیدے اور خیال کی تبلیغ کیلئے آزاد ہیں ۔اس کے باوجودحید رآباد میں سینٹر فار سیلیولر اینڈ مالیکیولر بائیولوجی کے ڈائریکٹر اور ریجنل سینٹر آف کونسل ڈیولپمنٹ کے چیئر مین پشپا ایم بھارگو نے اپنے پرمغز مضمون ’سائنسی مزاج سے عاری سائنسداں ‘Scientists without a scientific temperمیں لکھا ہے کہ مودی نے ممبئی میں منعقد سائنسدانوں کی اکیڈمی کے سامنے بھگوان گنیش کی مثال پیش کی ہے۔اس میں کہا گیا ہے کہ قدیم ہندوستان انسانی اعضاءکی پیوند کاری سے واقف تھا اور ہمارے پروجوں کے پاس کلوننگ کی ٹکنالوجی پہلے سے موجود تھی۔بصورت دیگر ارجن کے بھائی کرن کو بغیر کسی ماں باپ کے کیسے پیدا کیا جاسکتا تھا؟ پھر انہوں نے پیش گوئی کی کہ اکیسویں صدی کی سائنس اور روحانیت کی محیر العقل پیش رفت ایک دوسرے کے اختلاط سے روبہ عمل آئے گی ۔ انہوںنے لکھا ہے کہ مودی کی ان بے سر اور پیر کی باتوں سے دراصل قدیم اور عہد وسطیٰ کے ہندوستانی سائنسدانوں کی حصولیابیاں کی توہین کی جارہی ہے مگر افسوس کہ کئی اکیڈمیوں پر مشتمل ہمارے نام نہاد سائنسداںمودی کے اس جھوٹ کو خاموشی کے ساتھ سنتے رہے۔ کسی سائنسی ادارے نے ان کے اس غیر منطقی دعوے کے خلاف کوئی آواز بلند نہیں کی ۔شاید وہ ایسا اس لئے نہیں کرسکے کیوں کہ ان پر سیاسی دباﺅ رہا ہوگا ۔
Scientists Without A Scientific Temper
Pushpa M. Bhargava is the founder-director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology at Hyderabad, and chairman of the Southern Regional Centre of Council for Social Development.According to reports, January 17, 2015, Jawaharlal Nehru coined the term ‘scientific temper’ in his book The Discovery of India,
which was published in 1946. He was also the President of the
Association of Scientific Workers of India (ASWI), which was registered
as a Trade Union, and with which I was closely associated with in the
1940s and the early 1950s. (This may be the only example of a Prime
Minister of a democracy being the President of a Trade Union.) One of
the objectives of ASWI was to propagate scientific temper. It was very
active in the beginning, but fizzled out by the 1960s as the bulk of
scientists in the country, including many who were occupying high
positions, were themselves not committed to scientific temper which
calls for rationality, reason and lack of belief in any dogma,
superstition or manifest falsehood.
The conclusion
that our very own scientists — who would be expected to be leaders in
the development of scientific temper — did not possess scientific temper
themselves and were just as superstitious as any other group was
supported by another incident in 1964. Following a statement by Satish
Dhawan (who later became Secretary, Department of Space), Abdur Rahman
(a distinguished historian of science) and I, set up an organisation
called The Society for Scientific Temper, in January 1964, the founding
members of which included distinguished scientists like Francis Crick, a
Nobel Prize winner. For membership to the society, the following
statement had to be signed: “I believe that knowledge can be acquired
only through human endeavour and not through revelation, and that all
problems can and must be faced in terms of man’s moral and intellectual
resources without invoking supernatural powers.”
We
were disillusioned when we approached scientist after scientist and all
of them refused to sign the statement. Clearly they were devoid of
scientific temper. Following this disillusionment, I persuaded Professor
Nurul Hasan, then Education Minister, to have the following clause
included in Article 51A in the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution in
1976: “It shall be the duty of every citizen of Indian “to develop the
scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform.”
This should have woken up our scientists and reminded them of their duty vis-à-vis
scientific temper, but I do not believe that the situation in this
respect is any better, even today, than what it was 50-60 years ago. Let
me cite three examples.
Little improvement
During
the previous Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, then Human
Resources Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi asked the University
Grants Commission to issue a circular to all universities stating that
they should start a degree course in astrology. For this, he said, a
special grant would be given. My colleague Chandana Chakrabarti and I
filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court challenging this
dispensation. Our lawyer was Prashant Bhushan. The petition was admitted
but was eventually dismissed (as could be expected), for belief in
astrology — which is totally unscientific and irrational and has been
repeatedly shown to be a myth — is widespread, with those who dispense
justice also not being immune to it. Not one scientist came forward in
support of us; nor did any of the six national science academies we
have, on which a substantial amount of public funds are spent every
year. Our supporters, who even sent us unsolicited funds to fight the
case, were all non-scientists. In fact, recognising the above
inadequacies of our science academies and their insensitivity to
science-related social problems in general, I resigned from the
fellowship of three of our science academies in 1993.
The
second example would be the silence of our scientists and the six
science academies when, last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while
addressing a group of scientists in Mumbai, claimed that organ
transplantation was known in ancient India — he gave Ganesha with his
elephant head and human torso as an example.
The
third example would be the much publicised symposium on “Ancient
Sciences through Sanskrit” at the 102nd Indian Science Congress in
Mumbai, which was held earlier this month. At this meeting, it was said
that India had jumbo aircraft (60 x 60 feet; in some cases 200 feet
long) that flew between continents and planets 9,000 years ago (some
4,500 years before Harappa and Mohenjo-daro). Not only that, it was also
claimed that we had a radar system better than the present one, based
on the principle that every animate or inanimate object emits energy all
the time. And in the 21st century, “fusion of science and spirituality
will happen because of the law of inter-penetration,” it was said. I
doubt if any serious academic would have heard of this law which would
not make any sense. These and many other absurd claims made at the
symposium were an insult to the several real scientific accomplishments
of ancient and medieval India.
Winding up academies
None
of our so-called scientists of note and scientific academies has raised
a voice against these claims. Surely, the distinguished scientists who
organised the Science Congress knew what was likely to be said at the
symposium, but, perhaps, they believed in it all or were pressurised
politically. Therefore, there is a strong case for the annual Indian
Science Congress to be banned (as I also argued in my article in The Hindu,
“Why the Indian Science Congress meets should be stopped” (Open Page,
September 30, 1997), or its name to be changed to Indian Anti-science
Congress.
As regards the science academies, they can
easily be wound up without any damage being caused to Indian science.
India has not produced any Nobel Prize winner in science in the last 85
years – largely because of the lack of a scientific environment in the
country, of which scientific temper would be an important component.
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/scientists-without-a-scientific-temper/article6794464.ece
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