Arjun’s arrows had nuclear power, says West Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankhar at science fair

KOLKATA: Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankhar has followed in the footsteps of senior BJP leaders, claiming that Arjun’s arrows had “nuc-lear powers” and there were “udaan khatolas (flying machines)” in the Ramayana.
Dhankhar chose the inauguration of a science and engineering fair at the Birla Industrial and Technological Museum in south Kolkata to drop the N-bomb on an unsuspecting audience.“The plane was (invented) in 1910 or 1911. But ... if you delve into our old scriptures … in the Ramayana, we had this udaan khatola (flying machine). And, in the Mahabharata, we had a situation where Sanjay narrated everything and not from the (battle)field. We had those arrows of Arjun which had nuclear power,” Dhankhar said on Tuesday. He then stressed: “The world can no longer afford to ignore India. I cannot.”
Several BJP leaders have preceded Dhankhar in seeing science in the Indian epics and traditional beliefs. Tripura’s BJP CM, Biplab Deb, brought up the Sanjay parallel in April 2018, when he said the internet existed in the days of the Mahabharata as well. “Sanjay was blind but he narrated what was happening on the battlefield to Dhritarashtra anyway. This was due to internet and technology. Satellites also existed during that period,” Deb had said.
And Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh claimed in November 2019 that “research had showed” that cow’s milk contained gold.
Dhankhar has been repeatedly accused by the Bengal government and Trinamool Congress seniors of “acting on behalf of the BJP”. The Bengal governor is also the chancellor of the state’s universities (though a new law enacted by the state higher education department late last year has curbed much of those powers).
Educationists, however, expressed shock and dismay at the chancellor’s comments.
Eminent physicist and former Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) director Bikash Sinha described Dhankhar’s remark as “irresponsible, senseless and irrelevant”. “He has lost his mind. The governor should first read a bit of history and try to find out about the development of nuclear weapons in India. Then he should realise that the people of Bengal cannot be fooled by such baseless remarks. The ordinary middle-class and even the lower-middle-class people of our state are educated enough to know that nuclear weapons did not exist then. They will never believe or pay heed to such unscientific observations,” Sinha said.
He went on to add that such irresponsible comments would cost the governor his credibility. “So far we have heard similar remarks from some union ministers. Now, Dhankhar has jumped on to the bandwagon, which is unfortunate. He risks becoming a butt of jokes by making such comments,” Sinha added.
A senior scientist with a leading (central government) science research organisation said he was shocked and surprised by the governor’s observations. “Did flying machines and nuclear weapons exist in the age of the puranas? I think it is both sad and funny that we are having to discuss this. If someone tells me that they really did, my reaction would be, ‘Oh, really?’,” he said.
Presidency University emeritus professor of sociology Prasanta Ray felt that the comments were consistent with the BJP’s agenda of glorifying India’s past as part of its Hindutva agenda. “There is no evidence that science and technology had progressed thus in ancient India. The question that needs to be asked is that, if they did, then why did we have to learn and adopt science from others. The BJP’s explanation would be that Muslim invasion destroyed it all. But historical or archaeological facts do not corroborate that either,” Ray said.