SCIENCE-INDIA: Animal Lovers Get Scientists’ Goat

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Dec 6 2002 (IPS) - When five men were lynched for skinning a cow at Jhajjar, a small town 50 km west of the Indian capital in October, authorities ordered a post-mortem on the animal to determine whether it had been killed for its hide or was already dead previously.

Following the incident, Acharya Giriraj Kishore, leader of the World Hindu Forum that is closely affiliated to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), declared that the life of a cow, sacred in Hinduism, was worth more than that of five ‘dalits’ or people belonging to the lowest rung of the Hindu caste hierarchy.

To D Raghunandan, a member of the influential Delhi Science Forum (DSF), the gruesome incident and the bizarre reaction of authorities provides one example of the right-wing, pro-Hindu BJP government’s callous attitude to the safety of ordinary people while being eager to protect fundamentalist and obscurantist interests.

Another example, Raghunandan and other scientists at the DSF say, is the move by the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA), a statutory body, to halt research at some of the country’s leading laboratories and scientific institutions in the name of protecting laboratory animals.

The DSF is a non-profit, public interest organisation of scientists, technologists and social scientists working in the areas of science and technology policy.

”There is a lot of bother over the fate of laboratory monkeys, but no one seems to care that people are getting lynched or are dying from horrible diseases for which cures could be found only through testing in laboratories,” Raghunandan said.

But what Raghunandan and other secular activists and scientists find really worrisome is the coming together of fundamentalist groups and animal lovers to cripple laboratory research in India. ”This at a time when India is showing great promise as a leader in biotechnology,” he said.

Among those who have shown confidence in India’s potential in biotechnology is the world’s richest man, Bill Gates, who has contributed substantially to research in this country that is expected to lead to the development of a vaccine against HIV.

The CPCSEA has already moved against such prestigious institutions as the National Institute of Immunology, Jawharlal Nehru University and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi, the National Institute of Virology in the western city of Pune, the National Institute of Nutrition in central Hyderabad, the Institute of Chemical Biology in eastern Kolkata and the Indian Veterinary Research Institute in Bareilly, northern Uttar Pradesh.

In July, CPCSEA head Maneka Gandhi was sacked as minister of state for environment and forests along with the union health minister, C P Thakur, after the two engaged in a turf row over who had the right to regulate medical research.

After halting research at the JNU and the National Institute of Nutrition, Gandhi ordered on Sep. 28 ‘raids’ on the National Institute of Immunology (NII), which counts among its achievements a vaccine for leprosy, a continuing scourge in India.

Although the report of the CPCSEA following the raid was never made public, excerpts ‘leaked’ to the press talked of monkeys being underfed and many of them dying of tuberculosis.

”The CPCSEA and its team composed largely of animal rights activists have caused immense harm to the reputation of a premier scientific institution and scientific research as a whole,” said Mohan Rao, professor at the School of Social Medicine and Community Health under JNU.

Rao who, along with Raghunandan formed part of a team of the Delhi Science Forum that carried out an independent investigation of the state of affairs at the NII, pronounced the newspaper reports of the CPCSEA raids ”factually incorrect, grossly distorted and entirely misleading”.

Rao said that laboratories in India, especially premier government -run institutions, already follow guidelines on animal experimentation developed by the Indian National Science Academy (INSA) in 1992.

Under those guidelines, no large animal can be bled except in the presence of veterinarian and several must be kept in air-conditioned environments – a facility denied even to laboratory staff.

Rao pointed to the overwhelming power granted the CPCSEA, which is dominated by animal rights activists rather than scientists, to regulate and issue licenses, inspect institutions, decide upon violations and impose punishments including cancellation of licenses to conduct experiments on animals.

”It is now functioning as police, prosecutor, judge and hangman,” he pointed out. ”Other than the misplaced zeal and patent anti-science bias of the raiders, is the issue of the world-view motivating the so-called animal lovers. It seems to me to be based as profoundly on a distrust of that fundamental idea of modernism and egalitarianism as it is on a hatred of science,” Rao said.

”The link between the lynchings of ‘dalits’ at Jhajjar and the politics of cow protection could not be more explicitly stated than by Mr Giriraj Kishore of the VHP, justifying the killings by arguing that the life of a cow was worth more than that of five ‘dalits’,” Rao said.

Gandhi, an estranged member of the dynastic Nehru-Gandhi family by virtue of being the widow of Sanjay Gandhi, younger son of late former prime minister Indira Gandhi, refused to comment on the NII raids beyond saying that CPCSEA ‘s report of the raids were yet be made public.

Earlier, she said that all that the CPCSEA was attempting to do was to ensure decent conditions for laboratory animals, especially larger ones, and that the body’s guidelines were less rigorous than that in other countries such as in Britain.

But research leaders such as N K Ganguly, who heads the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), have pronounced the CPCSEA rules unrealistic and have objected to such requirements as the one that calls for separate clearances from the body for each experiment that involves animals.

Campaigns and litigation by such groups as Kindness to Animals and Respect for Environment have resulted in removal the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) last year of the dissection of frogs and similar experimental animals in biology practical classes, drawing protests from parents anxious that their wards pursue careers in medicine.

Commented A K Wangnoo, a well-known endocrinologist: ”Teaching swimming through correspondence courses is what the CBSE is aiming at with this ban on animal dissection.”