Cultural renaissance, says Rajnath on Moon mission success; Opp counters

“When we sleep on earth tonight, Vikram and Pragyan will perhaps wake up on the moon,” Singh said.

Speaking after Jitendra Singh, Congress leader in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said one should not confuse science with superstition. He said the Government was crediting Prime Minister Narendra Modi for every achievement.

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor took on the Government for making the Chandrayaan success “their moment to bask in glory, and polarise the country by speaking as if all space endeavours began only in 2014; first in the ancient years of the Vedas and then in 2014”. The Thiruvananthapuram MP also argued that the watershed moment of India landing a spacecraft on the Moon was the achievements of successive years of making the right governance choices over the past six decades and that the

“Chandrayaan triumph is truly pan-India, across the political divide; it does not belong to any person or any one party,” he said.

DMK’s A Raja also joined Tharoor, saying: “When Chandrayaan was sent to the Moon, naturally your mind and heart must enlarge. However, I feel with all sincerity, that on the one side you are sending Chandrayaan to space and on the other side, your heart and brain are going down.”

Initiating the discussion on Chandrayaan-3 and other achievements in the space sector, the Defence Minister said that of the 424 foreign satellites launched by India so far, 389 have been launched in the last nine years of the government.

However, he  took strong exception to those who say culture is against science. “If someone in India says our culture is against science, then I feel that they do not know anything about our culture or science… Our friends who think that science comes from the West, if they read history, they would know of many examples where scientists who went against the Church were poisoned or burnt alive. They had to hide their scientific thoughts. But, 2000 years ago when Aryabhat said that the Earth rotated on its axis did anyone protest him. When Varahmir said that Earth’s gravitational pull attracts everything towards it, did anyone call it against religion? People who have given scientific theories have been recognised as ‘rishis’ in India.”

He added that no nation has made economic, social, political and scientific progress without cultural renaissance.

Congratulating the ISRO scientists and the broader Indian scientific community for their successes, the defence minister said it is the result of the intellectual capacity of the ISRO scientists and their dedication towards the development of the nation that today the country has stood in the line of leading nations in the world of science.

Taking a jibe at Singh, saying he has “treated us to a lecture on a slightly different subject”, Tharoor said that grooming brilliant scientists, developing infrastructure, research and development, and global synergies and technologies cannot be achieved unilaterally by any one government. He recalled the Christian community in Thumba in Thiruvananthapuram chose to make a patriotic choice for development by donating the land on which their St Mary Magdalene Church and the residence of their bishop stood for the India’s national space programme in the early 1960s and the small educational institutions like TKM College of Engineering in Kollam – which was founded by a successful Muslim cashew merchant, Thangal Kunju Musaliarabbreviated – and the College of Engineering (CET) which produced a number of engineers for the ISRO.