Scientific Temper, Hindu Scientism and the future of Secularism in India

Meera Nanda

The Constitution of India upholds “cultivation of scientific temper” as one of the duties of citizens and exhorts the state to create conditions that encourage critical thinking. It was the hope of Jawaharlal Nehru and other modernists among the founding fathers that as scientific ideas and styles of thinking make inroads into the mainstream of Indian culture, superstitions will decline, the authority of gurus and god-men will lessen and a more democratic, evidence-based style of public discourse will take root and grow. Cultivation of scientific thinking was therefore an essential element of creation of a secular culture in the country.

This paper will examine how Hindu scientism, propagated by Hindu gurus and spiritual teachers and embraced by Hindu nationalist political parties, is subverting both science and secularism in India. Evidence will be provided to show the widespread presence of Hindu scientism in contemporary Indian society. Aided by neo-Hindu and New Age philosophers and gurus, Indians have learned to affix the label of “science” -- understood in the modern sense of evidence-based knowledge that has passed the test of stringent, properly controlled experimentation -- to traditional Hindu metaphysics, including utterly bogus and falsified ideas about non-corporeal consciousness, organic evolution through the agency of karma and rebirth, astrology, humoral medicine, architecture and such. While the name of science is routinely used to legitimize objectively false ideas, the empirical and naturalistic spirit of scientific inquiry is ridiculed as being “reductionist,” and “materialistic,” bearing the stamp of the “Western mind” which supposedly lacks the “depth” and “wisdom” of the “Hindu mind.” The rhetoric of science has been recruited for the purpose of Hindu apologetics and for asserting Hindu supremacy over other religions.