Opinion Hum Hindustani
A leader of a national political party was badly advised to take liberties with scientific facts in his interventions in the Lok Sabha.
A leader of a national political party was badly advised to take liberties with scientific facts in his interventions in the Lok Sabha. The argument that the Timuraid general Babar coming from the border areas of Kazakhistan and Kyrghistan into India with a few thousand soldiers many centuries ago led to a population segment which has a significantly different DNA won’t pass muster as credible.
The earlier DNA studies of the Indian population were done in the Nineties and results reported in the late Nineties. These were expensive studies and the sample was around two thousand persons,which for such studies is large. For example,a similar Chinese study was around eight hundred persons. The India study showed that there are no significant differences in the genetic make-up of Indians. In China such differences were significant between the Han and non Han segment of the populations. This finding had a profound impact on me. Earlier when I would travel across India I would have a sub-conscious feeling that we were different. After I read that study I would take a plane for two hours,get down and think he looks like my uncle or she is resembles my cousin.
According to Bhatnagar Award Fellow,Dr Lalji Singh at the prestigious CCMB,Hyderabad,”The present day Indian population is a mixture of two ancestral groups of the prehistoric period:Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI).” Dr Lalji Singh quoted the facts from a study published in ‘Nature’ in August 2009. He and Kumarasamy Thangaraj of CCMB,Hyderabad,in collaboration with David Reich of Harvard Medical University and Nick Patterson and Alkes L Price of the Institute of Harvard and MIT,Cambridge,did this study.
“We studied 1 million genetic markers in 132 individuals from 25 groups of Indians to conclude that they all were mixtures of ANI as well as ASI. ANI shows some lineage to the Europeans,” said Singh. As our great ancient culture developed it assimilated all Questioning the Aryan Dravidian theory,Dr.Lalji Singh added: “If true,the theory would imply that only the upper castes of India should have European lineage.” “But the study clearly shows that the mainland populations of India,irrespective of caste and tribe,have a European lineage,along with being a mixture of ANI and ASI.”
To be fair it needs to be understood that we need to do a lot of work to get higher levels of confidence in definitive statements. These samples are small. Economists are used to smples of ;laks as in the NSS. JNU’s Bamzai always cautions and has carried on a campaign against voodoo science in the days of instant results. In fact their studies of Kashmiri Brahmins shows that their genetic impact goes back to Central Asia,a kind of reverse flow to that talked of in Parliament.
More generally it seems that the melting pot works. Of course caste segmentation can lead to genetic health problems. Hum Hindustani Hain irrespective of our ancestry. Political groups have been known to have used voodoo science in the past and as then so now,it wont pass muster of the scrutiny of rational scrutiny of the testing of scientific hypothesis.
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