/ARTS WEEKLY/INDIA: Astrologers, Seismologists Put their Heads Together

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Rahul Bedi

NEW DELHI, Aug 5 2003 (IPS) - The worlds of astrologers and seismologists are normally poles apart, but not at a recent workshop in India where they tried to combine their divergent disciplines to forecast earthquakes and natural disasters.

At the recent seminar organised by the Astrology Study and Research Institute here, astrologers and seismologists extrapolated data from the January 2001 earthquake in western Gujarat state with planetary configurations at the time – in order to find a possible link between them and the disaster, which killed more than 20,000 people.

Astrological predictions regarding earthquakes over the next decade were also discussed at the meeting, which ended on Aug. 3.

Lachhman Das Madan, who heads the Astrology Study and Research Institute, said it was regretful that his warnings on the Gujarat tremors had been ignored because astrological inputs could help governments blunt the devastation wreaked by earthquakes.

Madan, whose book ‘Predicting Earthquakes and Calamities’ was released at the seminar, had forecast the Gujarat earthquake and its aftershocks in Iran eight years before it struck.

Astrology was not an occult science in the hands of eastern religious mystics, but very modern in iapproach, he said, because is based on cosmic planetary positions that require precise mathematical calculations.

In fact, astrologers at the seminar predict ‘serious and violent convulsions’ in the one-month period Jul. 29 onwards as the Earth and Mars come close together for the first time in 60,000 years.

After Aug. 29, they said, planetary configurations are likely to become ‘hostile’ to the world.

These are things closely followed in India, where majority are avid believers in astrology and frequently consult a battery of occultists, palmists and mendicants with supposed extraterrestrial powers to favourably manage the heavens for them.

Almost all have horror-scopes – an elaborate grouping of Sanskrit symbols and mathematical diagrams – prepared on the basis of date, place and exact time of birth aided by logarithmic charts detailing movement of the stars and the minutiae of their lives.

India’s politicians are especially partial to astrologers as celestial guides to help them win elections and remain in office in the prevailing political uncertainty.

Scores of members of parliament do not eat, travel or hold meetings unless their ”celestial minders” declare the moment propitious.

”The greater the ambiguity, the more politicians need astrologers as guides into the unknown, ” says one who has ably ”guided” senior MPs, through the maze of Indian politics and elections.

Whether these politicians believe everything their astrologers tell them is another matter. But as one senior MP from the recently dismissed government said, there was no ”celestial” advice he would forego. It just might work, he said. Though India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru ridiculed astrologers and the mumbo-jumbo surrounding their craft, succeeding premiers, including Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv, have been among their most willing clients.

Mrs Gandhi popularised soothsayers a year after she was voted out of office in 1977 for imposing an emergency, when her political survival was threatened. She turned to them, forever waiting in the wings, for succor. Many believe they were responsible for her return to power in 1980.

Several of her supporters now claim that Gandhi was assassinated four years later by her bodyguards because she did not take the necessary precautions recommended by her astrologer.

Her Cambridge University-educated son Rajiv, cynically dismissive of astrologers before joining politics, himself traveled across the country visiting influential ‘godmen’ when he was up for re-election in 1989.

One of the ‘sadhus’ or holy men Rajiv Gandhi visited lived in a tree and blessed him, assuring him of success by placing his feet on his head. Ironically, Gandhi’s party was voted out of office a few months later.

But Chandra Shekhar, the ‘stopgap’ prime minister who served just for three months in 1991 was, perhaps, India’s only modern politician to publicly defend the practice of astrology. Still, his army of ”star merchants” was unable to predict his downfall after 12 weeks in office.

Even T N Seshan, India’s highly principled and mercurial chief election commissioner, who presided for five years until 1996 over the entire electoral process, made no move without consulting the stars.

Earlier, whilst retiring as India’s cabinet secretary, the country’s most senior civil servant in the late eighties, he precisely timed the handover to the second – in keeping with the stars.

Unfortunately, however, Seshan’s auspicious time differed from the one chosen by his successor, also a die-hard numerologist.

A lengthy debate between India’s most senior civil servants followed, leading to a bureaucratic compromise by which the handover was extended by exactly 60 seconds.

Today there are over 200 ‘senior’ astrologers that are patronised by politicians in New Delhi, but a majority are charlatans who pick up tidbits of information and promote themselves as ‘extra-terrestrial’ political informants.

Some are ”plants ” by intelligence agencies or more often by rival politicians wanting to know their opponent’s strategies and ambitions.

Ultimately, however, a handful end up enjoying great power and influence, depending, of course, on the success of their patrons. Till, of course, the stars decree otherwise.