The political party of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). This party won the 2014 general elections by a landslide, and again in 2019. Since then the BJP has reportedly aligned with the RSS, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a paramilitary right-wing group. Modi has been accused of leading the country into what has been called a “Hindu religious autocracy.” The process of implementing a Hindu Nationalist agenda has been given the colorful name “saffronization.” No small part of it is the de-westernization of India.

Indian history and politics is very rich but unfamiliar to most westerners so I can’t go into detail other than to say that there is a strong Hindu Nationalism movement there. A level of rejection of Eurocentric values is to be expected given the history of British rule in the 20th century. India is a nuclear, space-faring nation today with much to be optimistic about.

Recently, Darwin’s theory of evolution has been removed from textbooks in 9th and 10th grade biology. The fear is that most students do not take biology later in their school years and therefore will have no understanding of this important aspect of biology. The decision to drop evolution from the 9th and 10th grade biology textbooks was a “content rationalization” made by a government organization called National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). NCERT claims that they dropped discussion of evolution during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to streamline online classes. India currently has 256 million primary and secondary students.

This has resulted in an uproar by Indian academics, including artists, writers, historians and scientists. The notion held by most scientists and mathematicians around the world is that physical and biological science is secular, i.e. it should not contain cultural, historical or racial structural elements imposing subjectivity in modeling the physical world.