As I wrote about earlier, animal rights activist Maneka Gandhi was removed this month from her position chairing India’s highest authority regulating animal experimentation. Princeton University physicist M V Ramana wrote an interesting op-ed in Pakistani newspaper Daily Times earlier in December highlighting the sort of nonsense that went on under Gandhi’s watch.
Ramana writes about the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals inspection and recommendations of primate research at India’s National Institute of Immunology. After that inspection, the CPCSEA claimed that most of the primates at the NII were undernourished and suffering from tuberculosis. The CPCSEA then suspended the NII’s authority to conduct primate research, although that decision was stayed by an Indian court.
According to Ramana, although the CPCSEA made its charges public and used its inspection to justify suspending the NII’s primate research program, it still has not made its inspection report public nor supplied a copy to the NII or anyone else.
The report probably hasn’t been made public because it is likely full of errors. The claim that most of the primates at the NII facility suffered from tuberculosis turned out to be false — only two of the 207 monkeys suffered from TB. Ramana writes,
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 for infant monkeys — were suffering from TB (which were denoted by plus signs). This could be laughed off as an error but for the “wastage for public funds and credibility of both NII and CPCSEA.”
Ramana, too, sees this as part of a disturbing rise of Hindu extremism in India (with Gandhi’s recent firing, on the other hand, being a welcome sign),
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.
For those not following Indian current events, Ramana is referring to the October 15, 2002 lynching of five men in Haryana. The men — all members of the lowest “untouchable” Dalit caste — were accused of killing cows and taking their skins to make leather. A mob of 4,000 to 5,000 people lynched took the men form police custody and lynched them.
Immediately after the lynching, members of the extremist Vishwa Hindu Parishad quoted Hindu religious writings to the effect that a cow is more valuable than a human being and that the penalty for killing a cow should be death.
Source:
Animal rights and wrongs. M V Ramana, Daily Times (Pakistan), December 19, 2002.