Scientists as shamans

After Pokhran II in May 1998, the saligh parivar in India wanted to distribute the radioactive sand of the Thar desert as the symbolic prasad of India's atomic deities. When some sensible scientists pointed out the dangers involved in the exercise, the scheme was quickly abandoned, and instead the idea of building a temple at the epicentre of the nuclear blast was floated. Better sense prevailed yet again, and the plan for the temple gave way to the enclosed open-air memorial that exists today.

In one memorable picture taken immediately after the Pokhran tests, APJ Abdul Kalam raises his hands along with fellow technocrats of India's atomic establishment accompanied by a jubilant George Fernandes and a satisfied-looking Atal Behari Vajpayee. The joy, alas, was to be short-lived for the Indian bhaktas of Nucleareshwar. Before long, the Chagai hills of Pakistan were trembling to Pakistan's own nuclear explosions. Pakistanis dutifully paraded on the streets, celebrating the arrival of Islamic science. The 'Hindu' bomb and the 'Islamic' bomb were now arrayed against each other, expressions of Indian and Pakistani boastfulness.

In reality, there is nothing 'Hindu' about the Indian Bomb, nor do the Pakistani nukes symbolise the cultural strength of Islam. These weapons of mass destruction are products of a pseudo-scientific mindset that is unconcerned about the ultimate effects of their obsessions. There can be no science without a sense of ethics and morality, but there will always be technicians who rush to fabricate weapons, ready to feed off the hubris of the ruling elite. It is the collective insecurity of the very small power elite in South Asia that transforms these purveyors of falsehood and fabricators of weaponry into angels of truth. But before getting into the messy business of exposing technofascism, I would like to debunk the myth of APJ Abdul Kalam, Republic of India's president-to-be, and the poster-boy Muslim of the likes of Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani and Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi.

The straw man

Contrary to the carefully cultivated image, APJ Kalam is no scientist, not by a long shot. Not one of his hypotheses has withstood peer review, he has not published in a scientific journal, and has not written a book in the discipline he claims to have mastered. Incidentally, he is no 'doctor' either – he got the prefix the way Mulayams of the region do – his degree is honorary. This was what made the prestigious Indian Institute of Science decline Kalam a professorship. His only formal qualification is a diploma from a technical institute, and all else in his eventful career is the result of the resolve of a marginal man to succeed in the mainstream at any cost.

The Indian media has been adulatory, describing Kalam as a scientific manager par excellence. Anyone familiar with the ways of the defence establishment in India, though, would be forgiven for suspecting this claim. The fact is that the republic puts so many resources at the disposal of institutions associated with weaponisation programmes that there is no incentive to optimise results. All that is needed is an ability to negotiate with component suppliers – the system takes care of the rest.

No one has cared to explain the exact role of Kalam in the building of the Indian Bomb or the fabrication of the missiles; for all we know, he may have been pushing files. But even if he were directly involved in hush-hush schemes, it is quite unlikely that he has anything to do other than read drawings supplied by the Russians and the French, or decipher the users' manual of the component suppliers from Germany and other west European countries. It is no secret that the Indian – and Pakistani – nuclear devices and missiles have been assembled from kits bought, begged, borrowed or stolen from countries that have the systems in place to produce such toys for the insane.

The assumption that Kalam may have been propped up by the sangh parivar to wash its sins of communal carnage is only partially true. A Muslim president of saffron India does give a soothing message to the world, but very few in South Asia are fooled by this empty gesture. Kalam's Muslim name is just an accident of birth.

If APJ Abdul Kalam is such a straw man, where is the need to demolish him? It is a legitimate question – after all, the office of the President of India remains largely ceremonial. To see another septuagenarian safely ensconced in the sprawling complex of Rashtrapati Bhawan on Raisina Hill should actually be vaguely comforting. Besides, Kalam the President will cause less harm to the rest of us in South Asia than he would do by being an unguided missile of the hawks in the defence establishment.

But Kalam's elevation to the highest post of the largest republic in the world signifies much more than the survival instinct of a mediocre man in a hostile environment. It heralds the acceptance of a pseudoscientist as the new shaman of a society mired in backwardness and orthodoxy. More than Kalam's personal success, it is the trend of treating technocrats as the new saviours that merits attention. Kalam's entry into the ruling coterie of New Delhi is merely the most prominent symptom of a disease that is currently sweeping South Asia – technomania.

The process of the deification of 'scientists' started in Pakistan where Abdul Qadeer Khan, accused in the West of nuclear espionage, was worshipped countrywide as the Father of the Islamic Bomb. When Kalam did his bit, he was similarly heralded as a great son of India and promptly decorated with a Bharat Ratna in 1997, the highest civilian honour of the country. All heads of state and government of Pakistan have hailed Dr AQ Khan for his 'major' contribution. Indians are going one better – they are in the process of making Kalam their head of state.

The technology creed

Kalam's punchline in his 13 June press-meet was dutifully repeated by media-persons, perhaps more in amusement than anything else. But if the "the nation is bigger than the individual" chant is the core value of the president-to-be of India, then the future of liberty in this region will require more careful monitoring. For, rhetorically, would Kalam have paused to reflect upon the definition of nation in the context of South Asia? Had he done so, he may have realised the pitfalls of this dangerous doctrine in a region where cultural diversity is a fact of life while the civilisational hubris is a fiction that resides in the minds of men (and a few women too, I must add) too ignorant to be plagued by self-doubt.

Not that there are no psychological explanations for the naive statement of the president-to-be. Kalam is an unmarried man, and leads a life bordering on asceticism. Such men, as Bertrand Russell shrewdly observed, pursue power with abandon, for, "asceticism stimulates power impulses". In a different context, Garry Wills opines, "A man without a wife to puncture his pomposity, without children to challenge his authority, in relations carefully structured to make him continuously eminent, easily becomes convinced of his superior wisdom".

Psychological analysis of an individual, though, is inadequate to explain the eminence granted to such men by a fawning social elite. It overlooks the social processes that give birth to the phenomenon of worshipping self-proclaimed technocrats as saviours. It does not explain why cardboard replicas of Chagai hills dominate the skylines of Islamabad and Karachi. It does not say why people in Pakistan do not object to the missile cutouts that stare at them from hoardings on public thoroughfares. Nor why we South Asians have learnt to deify the 'father of the nuclear bomb' or the 'missile man' just as we do our cricket stars and glamour queens.

Part of the explanation is surely the public disenchantment with politics itself. Politicians as a class invite derision and contempt. This is ironical, because not many people are yet ready to trade the inept administration of politicians for the firm rule of generals, maulavis or high priests. After the initial honeymoon following the ouster of the corrupt Nawaz Sharif regime, even General Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan has ceased to inspire confidence. Vajpayee may doze off during meetings, as the controversial Perry report in Time alleges, but who is ready to replace him with General Padmanabhan? Scientists, however, are in another league: they are the secular priesthood of the creed of Technomania.

Our blind faith in the wonders of technology would be touching, were it not so dangerous. For, what we consider science is not necessarily science. This, after all, is the region where the former physics professor Dr Murli Manohar Joshi goes gaga over the supposed science of Indian astrology. Dr Joshi's emphasis on what he calls a traditional knowledge system says as much about the saffronite conception of science as about the status of the discipline in South Asia. We are more interested in the 'wonders' of science than in its intricacies. So, what we get are Prithvis, Ghauris, Pokhrans and Chagais, not new vaccines, seeds with better yields or more reliable monsoon forecasting techniques. Scientists in South Asia are shamans who can unleash evil spirits on the enemy at the command of anyone who is ready to pamper their under-served egos. And increasingly, this 'enemy' of the power elite is us – we, the people of South Asia.

Science in our part of the world is Shiva the Destroyer, the Sword of the Caliph ready to draw the blood of the enemy. There is no bhakti of Vishnu and no sacrifice of the Sufis in the science of the Subcontinent. So the weapons that we have are named Prithvi and Ghazanavi – after warlords who did little to relieve human misery. The new aristocracy comprises not teachers, doctors and engineers, but generals, wheeler-dealers and technicians with egos bigger than their capabilities. They value uniformity, order and security, not diversity, organism and survival.

Had it been in the times of statesmen like Jawaharlal Nehru or Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the elevation of the bachelor from the backwaters of Tamil Nadu to the highest post of the biggest democracy may even have been welcomed with satisfaction for signifying the recognition of the underdog. But with a saffronite leadership east of the Wagah, and General Sahib lording it to the west, a missile man in Rashtrapati Bhawan makes South Asia even more volatile and dangerous. Politics may be dirty, but the dangers of bomb-makers as rulers – and generals as dictators – are too horrible to contemplate.

There is no magic cure for the ills besetting societies in South Asia. The process of change is slow and messy, a few steps forward and then some backward. To expect that generals and 'scientists' can rule better than the politicians is like living in the dark ages of all-powerful medicine men who could unleash the forces of the unknown. It is time for us to grow up – unknown forces are malevolent more often than not. The salvation of South Asia lies not in the hands of the prowess that shook Pokhran and Chagai. It resides in the hearts and minds of common people who know that food, shelter, medicine and education are far more urgent than a quest for renaissance through long-discredited doctrines such as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), or weapons of mass destruction with mythical monikers such as Nag and Trishul.