Shortly after the nuclear tests in May
1998, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee added “Jai Vigyan”
(Hail Science) to an old slogan “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” (Hail the
soldier and the farmer). Vajpayee’s paean to science was really to
technology, and that too of the kind that makes bombs and missiles.
Science as a process of trying to make sense of the world, which at
some stage involves the comparison of experimental evidence with
theoretical models, has little value for religious fundamentalists;
the Sangh Parivar is no exception to this rule. Their idea of
science is exemplified by their introduction of astrology into
university science curricula. A somewhat different — but related
–assault has been recent attempts to stifle scientific
experimentation with animals by animal rights groups.
The
latest victim of this ideological offensive has been the National
Institute of Immunology (NII), a leading scientific research centre
in Delhi. A few weeks ago, the Committee for the Purpose of Control
and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA) recommended that
the NII licence to experiment on primates be cancelled. This would
essentially halt much of the scientific work carried out in the
institute. NII had to obtain an interim stay order from the Delhi
High Court.
Set up in 1963, CPCSEA’s regulatory functions
started in earnest only in the late 1990s when Maneka Gandhi took
over the committee and rapidly changed rules on animal
experimentation. Reflecting her animal rights ideology, the new
regulations were widely criticised by the scientific community as
unnecessary red tape. The new rules also required the inclusion of
“a non-scientific socially aware member” on institutional animal
ethics committees, thereby creating openings for animal rights
activists. Armed with this official sanction, animal rights
activists conducted a series of controversial inspections on
scientific institutions, most recently at NII on September
28.
The CPCSEA inspection team charged that animals at the
NII facility were under-fed and that nearly 90 per cent of the
monkeys were infected with tuberculosis. Though these charges were
made public, the CPCSEA report itself is not publicly available. NII
doesn’t appear to have been given the report either. Under these
circumstances, for the CPCSEA to demand the cancellation of NII’s
licence has a Kafkaesque ring to it.
CPCSEA’s accusations
were soon shown to be baseless by the Delhi Science Forum, an
independent group. Their inspection discovered that the monkeys were
being fed adequate diets and that only two out of the 207 monkeys
had tuberculosis. It turned out that the CPCSEA team, not being
well-versed with the procedures followed at the NII animal facility,
had assumed that animals with crosses in their records — indicating
that they had not been tested for tuberculosis, which is common with
infant monkeys — were suffering from TB (which were denoted by plus
signs). This could be laughed off as an error but for the “wastage
of public funds and credibility of both NII and CPCSEA”. What is
more alarming is that in its conversations with the CPCSEA
inspection team, the DSF group detected “significant bias... against
use of animals in scientific research, pre-conceived notions and
pre-determined conclusions about harm being done to
animals.”
Such notions put a short-term notion of animal
welfare above long-term betterment of both humans and animals. They
ignore the crucial role played by animal testing in advancing
scientific understanding of the human body and disease treatment.
For example, much of our understanding of how radiation affects
humans comes from experiments involving animals. Though vital,
epidemiological studies on the survivors of the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, as well as workers at nuclear facilities, are not
controlled experiments. Animal experiments are necessary to
understand what would happen in situations with no prior experience
— for instance, inhaling a large quantity of plutonium. More
familiar examples are those required for the testing of vaccines or
drugs. Antibiotics like penicillin, for example, were developed
through rodent tests. Animal rights activists also pay no heed to
the benefits accruing to animals themselves from experiments
involving animals; they are also treated with vaccines and
drugs.
Maneka Gandhi and the CPCSEA also try to justify their
actions as aimed at improving science by making statements like
“Nearly Rs. 22,000 crores has been spent since Independence on
medical and bio-science research. Yet, we are still to patent
anything worthwhile”. Science, being a very open-ended process,
unfortunately doesn’t work in this linear fashion. That said, it is
still clear by most yardsticks that the Indian scientific community
hasn’t produced as much as it could. But tracing the problem to poor
treatment of animals makes little sense. If that were to be the
case, every other branch of science except for the life sciences —
physics, geology, etc. — should be flourishing. They are not. If the
diagnosis is bad, the cure is worse. Requiring professors to waste
time on paperwork would only make them more unproductive.
Scientists themselves are not averse to good animal care
practises, not in the least because poor specimens might produce
shoddy results. But being regulated by animal rights activists is
akin to having a set of vegetarian or vegan crusaders oversee the
state of slaughterhouses. Clearly their primary interest would be to
shut them down rather than to have them be run in a clean and
hygienic manner.
There is a more dangerous underside to these
actions, and that is the connection, albeit oblique, to Hindu right
wing ideology with its fatalistic notions of Karma theory and its
support for a caste hierarchy where upper castes claim superiority
partly on account of their vegetarianism and not coming into contact
with “dirty animals”. Some go further: activists belonging to the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad justified their lynching of Dalits in Haryana
by suggesting that the cow is more precious than a human being. The
recent saga of the CPCSEA is thus dangerous at many levels: the
distortion of an official institution, obstacles to scientific
progress, and ultimately a challenge to rational
democracy.
