Conflict Between Science and Faith in India

On June 7, 2025, a shepherd who became a farmer in his early days, and later a long-time heart patient, Kancha Kattaiah (77), died peacefully while sitting on the toilet commode in Hyderabad, Telangana. It appears that the Star Edward Steel Mitral Valve replaced in his heart on December 17, 1979, stopped working after 45 years and six months. This was the first-generation valve made by the Edward Company, the US. Kattaiah got this thoracic surgery done in the Christian Medical College (CMC) Hospital, Vellore, started by a Christian missionary woman doctor Ida.S.Scudder in 1900.

Though the procedure was beyond his means, as a man who believed in science and modern medicine, Kattaiah got it done by making several trips to CMC, which is 600 kilometers away from his village.  

According to Dr. (Padmashri) Dasari Prasada Rao, who began the earliest bypass surgeries in the early 1980s in the Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS), “Perhaps Kattaiah is the longest survivor with that single valve without going for re-surgeries in the history of Edward valves”. Dr Beerappa Nagari, now NIMS Director, a famous gastroenterology surgeon, says “Kattaiah’s survival for so long with the same valve is a medical miracle”. Hence, villagers, in a growing environment of superstition and many people dying with blind faith, call him the ‘Science Man’ of their village.  

THE 1970s MEDICAL SITUATION 

Back in the 1970s, there were no basic heart related diagnostic tools, such as ECG, Echo etc, in Hyderabad. Medical science in India was very backward in spite of the fact that the Nehruvian scientific spirit was around in academic discourses by then.

Even now, India has not evolved into a scientifically discoverer nation, medical or other. We still depend on the West for new discoveries. Hence, there is need for a serious discussion around science and faith in India.       

After 25 years of the establishment of the CMC Vellore Hospital, which used advanced medical science to keep Kattaiah alive for more than 45 years after surgery, the RSS or Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was formed as a Hindu missionary organisation.

While Western missionaries started schools and hospitals in India, the RSS focussed on an anti-Muslim and anti-Christian campaign, shifting the nation’s discourse from scientific temper to secularism versus communalism. Tonnes of material was written on this issue, but much less on science and how to overcome superstition and blind faith.               

THE MAIN FOCUS OF RSS EVEN NOW

Ever since the RSS and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in Delhi in 2014 and also in many states, the conflict between science and faith and superstition is not a major debate issue. Critiques of blind faith, particularly Hindu or Muslim, are getting politicised on a daily basis. Litigations around issues of hurting sentiments have increased several-fold. The media is full of faith-based news. Science gets hardly any attention in the Indian media.  

As the RSS controls the core structures of the nation, faith is being projected as the core value of the nation. But when people are sick or immobilised because of accidents and so on, they need to go to hospital, which is a place of science, and not to institutions of faith. Epidemics get fought with science, not with faith. We have seen and experienced that during the COVID-19 pandemic.        

SCIENCE IS NOT PART OF OUR THINKING

Science as a process of human thinking is not at all taken seriously in India. Agriculture is a science itself. A farmer like Kattaiah, since he was not exposed to faith mobilisation, depended only on science. That is why he survived a major heart disease.     

While the general atmosphere in the nation is such, even Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other ministers keep on speaking about faith. If this mode of thinking does not change in the governing elite, the nation will begin to think that science is foreign, not Indian. The RSS-BJP rule has pushed the nation into science versus faith-based conflict. The idea that faith cures every disease seems to be growing under this regime. 

We do not see RSS-BJP cadres and leaders defending science when there is a conflict between science and faith. They do not allow individual thinking in their ranks. The Chinese and Russian communist parties did exactly the opposite. They did not allow any individualist faith-based thinking. That created its own problems when it was done from a position of power.

The Arab rulers or Pakistan or Afghanistan rulers also do not stand by any science-centred ideological position of individuals or groups. Do they have independent growth of their own science? No. They, too, are fully dependent either on Western science or on Chinese? If the present trend continues, India will fall into the same strap of ‘all faith, no science.’  

There is an increased tendency to project that faith is nationalist and scientific thinking is anti-national. By way of killing scientific thinking or killing the constant questioning abilities of children, adults as part of Indian civilisation. But Indian civilisation developed around agriculture as science. The Right-wing school does not realise this.

What is being forgotten in the process is that human life begins with the process of science and it primarily grows with scientific treatment of children. For example, when a child is born, feeding milk or other forms of food is a scientific process. From the milk feeding stage to food eating stage, faith does not enter a child’s life. The idea of faith begins to be formed in the mind of a child either by observing the parent’s faith-related practices, like pooja or prayer, or with a specific instruction process through schooling.

The Gurukuls and Madrasas historically did this. But the modern school is different. It must turn to teaching science as a life process. Science is culture too. But the RSS propagates only faith as culture.   

The modern school system is mainly meant to teach science and also some amount of faith issues. If faith becomes the central theme of school teaching, the human mind cannot not work in scientific laboratories at all. Because faith does not accept experimentation.

The present political trend, as it is heavily bent on faith, does not accept experimentation. If India is ruled by faith as the central theme of nationalism for long, the nation is bound to remain dependent on the West for science.  

For an average human being, including the voter, this appears the only way of life. We may use science, engineering, medicine, or technology as part of the scientific thinking of Western humans. As long as the supply chain of science continues, we will live like this. If the scientific thinking supply chain becomes unavailable to us, we will start walking, eating our old food, and living in our old type sheds. Our own children are not being allowed to think critically in homes, in the markets. Once young minds are not allowed to question other’s practices and his/her own practice, where will we land?

When our children see critical thinkers being attacked on the roads, on TV channels, in newspapers, they begin to think that they should follow the mob. They surrender to faith and begin to hate science. In such an atmosphere, one may become an engineer by routine training, or a doctor or a so-called lab scientist. But there is no critical creative mind in that social milieu-- in that factory, in that hospital or in that lab where innovations need to take place. The RSS-BJP kind of ideological campaign of faith makes us compete with another blind faith nation, like Pakistan.   

Kattaiah, who survived for more than 45 years with a scientifically made valve to repair a damaged heart, should serve as an example that science is the main source of life, not faith. Faith is only a supplement for confidence-building, not a source of cure. Hence, the villagers were right when they shouted a slogan in his memorial meeting of celebration of his science life “Long Live Science” in his native village on June 16, 2025. 

The writer is a political theorist, social activist, and reformer. His latest book is The Shudra Rebellion. The views are personal.