Sidhu’s cancer cures & Ashwini Vaishnaw’s CPR signal one thing. Science is eroding

Transformation of fringe theories into institutional policy was so gradual that many missed it. First, scientific institutions were demolished. Now, there's faulty CPR & fake cancer cures.

Congress leader Navjot Singh Sidhu along with wife Navjot Kaur Sidhu addresses a press conference about her cancer | ANI

Rs 850 crore is a lot of money, even for a celebrity like Navjot Singh Sidhu. But miracle cures don’t come cheap these days.

The former cricketer and TV anchor’s wife, whose first name is also Navjot, beat Stage IV breast cancer thanks to a special diet, Sidhu claimed at a press conference last week. That the viral video was widely circulated on WhatsApp should give you some indication as to the veracity of its content—it sits perfectly among forwards about UNESCO declaring Jana Gana Mana as the world’s best national anthem and theories about how the BJP’s performance in the 2024 general elections was actually a masterstroke by Modiji. But Sidhu asserted that specific remedies like consuming neem leaves and “alkaline water” and avoiding foods like sugar and refined flour helped Kaur overcome her illness after doctors had given her only 40 days to live.

It is the nature of these claims about miracle cures to whip up a frenzy of attention—while the truth haplessly attempts to catch up. Still, the response to the video was swift. Soon after, a group of 260 oncologists from Tata Memorial Hospital issued a public notice warning against these unproven remedies, labelling them “unscientific and baseless”. That only served to light a fire under Sidhu, who tripled down on his claims by publishing the full meal plan, as well as photos of his wife eating said foods. Social media users had to gently point out the chemotherapy bag that Kaur was intravenously hooked to, a minor detail that somehow got lost in Sidhu’s enthusiastic endorsement of neem leaves.

In response to these statements, the Chhattisgarh Civil Society (CCS) issued a Rs 850 crore legal notice to Navjot Kaur Sidhu, demanding evidence to support her husband’s claims within seven days. The notice criticised the assertions as “misleading” and warned that such misinformation could lead cancer patients to abandon effective allopathic treatments, thereby increasing their health risks. But in an India where the Prime Minister offers the example of Lord Ganesha as evidence of ancient India’s plastic surgery capabilities, Sidhu’s claims are business as usual.

Take the case of Ashwini Vaishnaw, Union Minister for Railways, who recently shared a video of a travelling ticket examiner performing CPR on a fully conscious elderly passenger. The TTE vigorously administered chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a man who was not only breathing but also quite capable of expressing his distress. The ministry had likely tweeted the video to get ahead of all the seasonal criticism it faces due to the deplorable conditions of our trains. Until doctors across social media began to point out that performing CPR on a conscious person is not only ineffectual but actively deadly. Vaishnaw deleted the video soon after, but millions had already watched it.

Dismantling of scientific temper

The incident would merely be amusing if it weren’t so dangerous. Like Sidhu’s neem leaf protocol, it represents a peculiar brand of medical misinformation that comes with an official stamp of approval. That a Union Minister couldn’t distinguish between actual emergency care and what could potentially harm a passenger speaks volumes about the state of scientific literacy among our leaders. But it shouldn’t surprise us: This is the victory lap of a carefully cultivated ecosystem where scientific temper has been systematically dismantled. And it’s all unfolded in front of our eyes over the last few years. The journey from “ancient India had internet” to “CPR for conscious patients” has been shorter than we might think.

I remember a time when my colleagues and I would laugh every time a new fact-free pronouncement would come from ministers and judges. A peacock impregnates a peahen through its tears, they’d say, and we’d share memes. Global warming is just a state of mind, they’d declare, and we’d roll our eyes. Our newsroom placed bets on which elected official would next discover evidence of ancient Indian superiority in which Hindu text. But somewhere between 2014 and 2019, our smiles began to fade. We began to see these weren’t just absurd statements to be mocked—they were calculated stepping stones in a larger campaign to conflate science and Hindu mythology.

The campaign had many voices, each more confident than the last. There was Rajasthan’s Vasudev Devnani, then state education minister, who announced that cows were unique in the animal kingdom for both inhaling and exhaling oxygen. Then MP Satyapal Singh dismissed Darwin’s theory of evolution because none of our grandparents had ever spotted a monkey transforming into a human in the forest. BJP parliamentarian Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank declared modern science a “pygmy” compared to ancient Indian astrology.

These trial balloons tested how far scientific fact could be bent before it broke. When the Prime Minister himself cited Karna’s birth as proof of ancient India’s mastery of genetic science, it was a firm signal that pseudoscience had found its way from WhatsApp groups to Parliament, from conspiracy theories to policy meetings. By the time rationalists and activist-journalists like Govind Pansare and Gauri Lankesh were silenced for questioning superstition and caste stigmas, we understood that the joke had always been on us.

The transformation of fringe theories into institutional policy was so gradual that many missed it. First came the demolition of scientific institutions. The Indian Science Congress, which had once hosted luminaries like CV Raman, SN Bose, and even Jawaharlal Nehru as its presidents, found itself struggling for relevance. In 2015, the government launched a parallel body—the India International Science Festival (IISF), with a budget five times larger than the ISC’s. By January 2024, the final blow was struck: the Department of Science and Technology cancelled funding for the ISC altogether.

Meanwhile, our premier institutions started hosting events that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. The Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi—an institution that young students quite literally die to get into—hosted a two-day workshop on validating “panchgavya” research. In 2017, protests led to the cancellation of an astrology workshop organised by the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. It seems almost quaint in comparison to 2022, when the Ministry of Science and Technology announced “Akash for Life”, a four-day conference dedicated to integrating Hindu cosmological concepts into academia. When IIT Mandi’s director, Laxmidhar Behera, also a spiritual guru, blamed non-vegetarianism for Himalayan landslides, it barely raised eyebrows. The same institutions that had once championed evidence-based thinking were now legitimising mythology as science.

Even more alarming was the quiet infiltration of pseudoscience into healthcare policy. The National Health Mission introduced a bridge course allowing Ayurveda practitioners to practice modern medicine, despite never having studied it. The government also established the Rashtriya Kamdhenu Aayog in 2019, a body dedicated to researching the “scientific” properties of cow products.

The cost of pseudoscience

The true cost of this institutional embrace of pseudoscience became devastatingly clear during the Covid-19 pandemic. When India needed oxygen and hospital beds, we got Coronil and claims about how flies spread the virus through infected faeces—the latter promoted in a video by no less a luminary than Amitabh Bachchan himself. While patients gasped for breath in Delhi’s hospitals, Baba Ramdev hawked his “cure” with government approval for weeks. Homoeopathy and traditional medicine, long positioned as solutions to India’s healthcare gaps, eventually proved powerless against a virus that had no respect for belief and sentiment.

Today, we are at a point where over 100 scientists from India’s most respected research institutions have to sign statements decrying the “active opposition to scientific approach”. When a Union Minister can’t recognise basic medical procedures, and a former cricketer feels emboldened to challenge hundreds of oncologists, it signals the completion of a project years in the making.

The tragedy is, in a country where healthcare remains inaccessible to millions, traditional medicine and local remedies could serve as crucial bridges to wellness. Ayurveda and homoeopathy have long offered comfort and care to populations neglected by our fractured medical system. But there’s a vast difference between acknowledging these practices as complementary care and elevating them to state policy.

The 850 crore legal notice to Sidhu won’t undo this damage. Having replaced scientific temper with superstition, we’re now watching the cost being calculated not in crores, but in preventable tragedies.

Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)