Misleading headline by BBC. The very first sentence in the article is this: "Indian scientists have hit out at speakers at a major science conference for making irrational claims."
So clearly there are scientists in India who are fighting the good fight for scientific rigor and accountability, but this is in the context of ruling party politicians making comments pushing these sorts of crackpot theories in support of a nationalist glorification agenda. There is currently plenty of reason to worry about the politicization of science in India.
Yes there are flat-earthers in the US, but they dont speak from the podium of the most premier scientific platform of their country. Trump himself is another matter, in fact there are some parallels between Modi and Trump.
There are indeed lots of parallels between the two men.
Its important to expose these guys and make people uncomfortable enough, have their ego hurt enough so that they feel compelled to respond. So in a backhanded way BBC is doing a good thing.
There is also the question of how the headline is read. Is it read as 'all Indian' scientists or Some whose nationality happen to be Indian. Given that its being broadcast from a forum called the "Indian Science Congress" I cannot honestly complain because that platform is intended to speak for India and its scientists.
Surely you jest.
An April, 2016 academic study of bit.ly links shared on Twitter to BBC, CNN, Fox News, New York Times and Huffington Post articles found that 59 percent of the links were never clicked. And another study of push-through news alerts to mobile phones found that “People click on the alert about half the time.”
Source: https://honestreporting.com/tag/misleading-headlines/
What this means is most people only read the headline and not even the first line.
"Some academics at the annual Indian Science Congress, inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, publicly dismissed the discoveries of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein."
Yeah some scientists are calling them out, but that does not take away the fact that such crackpot ideas are being proselytized by the speakers at one of the premier venues of "science"
Yes some scientists are speaking out but they werent exactly unaware of the speakers beliefs, yet the speakers were invited to be the speakers. Shows how much importance and inflence these scientists, who are speaking, out have.
Note these speakers are not riff-raffs either, they are academics holding important academic positions, they got promoted to these positions. Lending support to these ideas likely had a thing or two to do with the promotions.
Now imagine which kind of scientists will get the government grants, the vedic helicopter running on cow piss or the other kind.
Also imagine the motivation level of a indian scientist in USA or Europe to come back to india and take up an academic position unless of course they happen to subscribe to such ideas.
Impression left by BBC headline: Indian scientists are wack
Like, come on. One could do the same by compiling the views of every ridiculous theory espoused by people like Ben "grain silos" Carson or young earth creationists in America and write "American scientists dismiss reason". Are there a significant amount of people that believe nonsense like this? Sure, maybe. Is that representative of American scientists as a whole? Of course not.
And it's the same thing here. I guarantee you a biology grad student at some place like IIT is under no delusions about the origins of stem cell research.
Personally I'm more bothered by why it says "India scientists" instead of "Indian scientists".