When future's in the past

Sunanda K Datta-Ray discusses the double standards that pervade the Indian political establishment's embrace of unproven scientific nationalism

The inaugural date of the long overdue and possibly grudging decision on free vaccines may be even more significant than the decision itself. By announcing that the new dispensation will kick off on International Yoga Day, Flowing White Beard has not only thrown a sop to the enraged Bushy Black Beard, but also assured out-of-joint Ayush noses that they can expect a slice of the rich medical pie.

That’s what it is all about. As Somerset Maugham put it, an extra thousand a year (a princely sum then) soothes all anger. “Where there’s muck, there’s brass (money)” as the Yorkshire saying has it and the pandemic reeks of both. Not just the brisk free market in everything from oxygen cylinders and ICU beds to ambulance rides and wood for cremation. But also Big Bucks like Forbes’ finding that 40 of the world’s 493 new billionaires waxed rich in pharmaceuticals, while eight vaccine tycoons added $32.3 billion to their wealth.

Yet, although four of India’s richest are in healthcare, and the topmost among them leads the world in making vaccines, no Yoga, Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha or Homeopathy practitioner is among the elite. This is downright colonial discrimination. China’s vaccine tycoon Jiang Rensheng has more than trebled his wealth during the pandemic; a Pune-based manufacturer rents a mansion in London’s fashionable Mayfair for a weekly $69,000; but ayurvedic makers are stuck in remote Haridwar.

The unkindest cut is that this was going to be the century of the past. The past would be the future as FWB marched triumphantly backwards to cleanse "barah sau saal ki gulami, twelve hundred years of servitude” while his Rs 20,000-crore Central Vista eliminated all trace of British rule. Revisionist history is patriotic history which replaces alien gods with heroic desi subalterns.

When George W Bush, who was startled to discover that “more and more imports come from overseas”, was elected president, an American newspaper jeered that a man unknown throughout America had become unknown throughout the world. Here, the media hailed as brilliant innovation the repackaging of Jawaharlal Nehru’s “import substitution” as lofty “atmanirbhar”. It’s the win-win game of “Follow the Leader” (also called “His Master’s Voice”) that pontificating TV anchors, populist politicians, pimps and pundits play to clamber up the greasy pole. The “internationally acclaimed visionary” who is also a “versatile genius, who thinks globally and acts locally” best protects human rights. 

As the new norm dawned, BBB revealed that far from being a science, surgery is a skill that Ayush practitioners have mastered. Never mind if they have never heard of Gray’s Anatomy, leave alone peeped at the 1,500-plus pages between its covers; they can deftly plant elephants’ heads on human shoulders and create babies outside the womb like Karna. Even two jabs could not save more than 10,000 allopathic doctors who had not drunk cow’s urine, smeared their bodies with cow dung or clanged metal plates at sunset. 

Cosmetic surgery, plastic surgery, reproductive genetics, space capability, you name it, ancient Hindus invented it. Having discovered zero, they mastered time and dispensed with vaccination so that elections could spin out forever and millions jostle in the Ganga. Akhilesh Yadav, who laughs at them only because there was no Gorakhnath Math in Australia, can still learn from the Lakshadweep administration painting coconut trunks saffron. Nature, too, must follow the leader. 

One of FWB’s loyal ministers told the 102nd Indian Science Congress in Mumbai that while Indians neglected their heritage, Germany purloined it to develop cutting-edge technology. We must be more proactive, he urged. His own management of seven or eight portfolios makes the American journalist who styled himself “Editor, Heaven and Earth” because he held charge of the newspaper’s Church and weather news look under-employed. 

Instead of fretting and fuming and rushing to a judiciary that slavishly sanctifies colonial concepts like Habeas Corpus and the rule of law, India’s medical fraternity should consider the deprivation their Ayush brethren suffer. There is cold comfort in a university prescribing two new yoga texts without banning all existing allopathic texts and strictly forbidding enterprising Congress or Trinamool Congress’ fifth columnists to reprint any.  

The cat slipped out of the bag as rumour spread that hoards of secreted gold make cow’s milk yellowish. Never had any animal been prized more. Governments rushed to ban slaughter; gau raksha became a sacred national duty; the merest suspicion of beef invited instant lynching. Blest with gold from our smuggled cows, Bangladesh’s GDP soared. 

The Ramrajya to come when saffron-draped pundits rule Bharat from the Ram Mandir whose inauguration sanctified FWB’s coronation will not permit India’s wealth to be drained away. It will also abolish the “stupid science” of allopathy and elevate alternative medicine as the mainstream. Our rulers can always seek treatment abroad when needed. BBB and FWB are two sides of the same coin.