"Meera Nanda, originally a bio-technologist, crossed over to humanities... Since then, she has been writing articles and giving lectures denouncing Indian culture as inherently anti-scientific and accusing Indian nation builders of paving the way for pseudo-science and even of having a Nazi mindset. Another of Nanda’s article – ‘Calling India’s Freethinkers’, accuses Swami Vivekananda and Bankim Chandra (forefathers of the Indian national resurgence) of the ‘cardinal sin’ of trying to appropriate modern scientific thought for Hinduism. Even Nehru, who fostered scientific rationalism, gets lumped into this charge. She calls on the ‘progressive scientists’ of India to ‘carefully but firmly un-twine the wild and uncontrolled intertwining of science and spirituality that has been going on in Hinduism since the time of Swami Vivekananda in the late nineteeth century’. All attempts to investigate Hinduism in the light of science are declared to be linked to Hindutva, including work by the ‘apologists associated with the Ramakrishna Mission and Aurobindo Ashram’. She finds that any claim of Indian culture being scientific ‘constitutes the central dogma of Hindutva’. Links between Indian culture and science resonate with ‘deeply Hindu and Aryan supremacist overtones’. ... In what seems to be a blatant contradiction, she solicited and was awarded the John Templeton Foundation Fellowship in Religion and Science (2005-7), which coincidentally occurred under the leadership of a self-declared Evangelical Christian in 2006. Nanda has supported Protestantism as being scientific, while describing Hinduism as the exact opposite.... Nanda is representative of a pattern: The Templeton Foundation brings together science with Judeo-Christianity, and uses willing Indians like Nanda to attack Indian spiritual traditions."
Meera Nanda

January 1, 1970