BJP MP Satya Pal Singh (Express photo by Renuka Puri/Files)
The hands of the Doomsday Clock stand at two minutes to midnight, the moment representing the certainty that whether by intelligent design or bungling stupidity, humanity will annihilate itself. It has been this close to midnight only once before, when the chill of the Cold War set in in 1953. Stalin was dead and Nikita Khrushchev, who would go on to denounce him, had taken charge. Truman had lost the White House to the conservative Eisenhower. The future direction of US strategic thinking was unclear and the Russians tested their first thermonuclear bomb, along with strategic weapon designed to be carried by Tupolev jets.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the Doomsday Clock at the beginning of every year, believes that the geopolitical picture of 2018 is as dangerous as that of 1953. It had sounded the alarm last year, too, and never neglects to point to the grandstanding at the India-Pakistan border as a serious source of risk, but it hardly gets any play in the subcontinent. When we hear the bad news, we switch off.
This year, of course, the threat represented by South Asian rivalry has been dwarfed by the club-waving and sabre-rattling between Washington and Pyongyang, led by two petulant children. One tweets vitriol at the crack of dawn. The other greets the day with device and missile tests. Before this escalation, a false alarm like the one in Hawaii would not have caused a panic. Now it does, because heavily armed children are alarming, and something is liable to go off.
This year, the atomic scientists have also registered their anxiety about “the loss of public trust in political institutions, in the media, in science, and in facts themselves — a loss that the abuse of information technology has fostered.” Fake news and misleading discourses are having the same effect as computer malware, interfering with humankind’s ability to make the rational, informed choices on which democracy depends. The need to protect citizens from manipulation is urgent, as well as the need for cooperation across borders to fight menaces that are unrestricted by geography. And for the first time, vulnerabilities in the Internet of Things have been identified as an impending threats.
But such high matters have not been bothering us in India very much. We remain focused on monkey business. Satya Pal Singh, the junior minister for education, has set the sabre-tooths among the pterodactyls with his proposal to remove the theory of evolution from syllabi because no one has ever seen an ape evolve into a man. The argument is not exactly new, and the uproar over the incident was inexplicable. Deeply wounded scientists stood up in the defence of Charles Darwin, though the scientific mind should have understood that the minister was at least partially correct. The latest evidence proves beyond doubt that certain apes have not evolved at all in critical respects that define humanity. There was nothing to squabble about, but the issue grabbed significant space in the realm of media debate and outrage.
And the other great debate, valuable for filling airtime, continues unabated. Padmavati lost a terminal vowel like a milk tooth to reach theatres, and has been revealed to be a deathly bore which is easily mistaken for a very long ad for designer jewellery. Nevertheless, it remains a focus for the cameras. Including cellphone cameras, like the one which produced a video inside the school bus which was attacked by agitators in Gurugram. And the fates conspired to have the prime minister telling an audience in Davos, the very same day, about the rewarding experience of being in India.
Davos represented another opportunity to get the smoothly evasive Raghuram Rajan to say that the government’s flagship interventions were mistakes (his response to Prannoy Roy: “The jury is out on GST until the last tax collections of the year are in. But Rahul Bajaj gave satisfaction with the sensational claim that the threat of the Left pulling the rug had prevented Manmohan Singh from going to Davos when he was prime minister.
Among other talking heads at Davos was media owner Aroon Purie, who underwent the unusual procedure of being interviewed by his own employee, Rahul Kanwal. “You understand the numbers better than anyone else,” declared Kanwal. In Davos, which was crawling with numbers guys this week, that sounded a little reckless.