New Delhi, Dec 19: This is with reference to Amita Singh’s article Animal farm (HT, November 5). Dr Singh was a member of the team of the Committee for the Purpose of Control and Supervision of Experiments on Animals (CPCSEA) that reportedly ‘raided’ the National Institute of Immunology (NII). Sensational stories were published about this ‘raid’ based on briefings of the raiding team.
A study group from the Delhi Science Forum (DSF) subsequently visited the NII to examine the veracity of the reports. Our conclusion was that these were incorrect, grossly distorted and thus misleading. This report is available with the DSF. It seems that most newspapers think that reporting the truth about scientific institutions is boring while exaggerated and sensational stories about evil scientists are not.
All institutions need norms to guide everyday actions. The institutions of science are no exception. The ghastly ‘experiments’ at the Nazi death camps led to the first ethical guidelines governing scientific experiments involving humans. These have been debated and new norms have evolved over the years. Similarly, such norms have also been evolved for animal experimentation.
In India, it was the Indian National Science Academy (INSA), which first evolved guidelines for animal experimentation in 1992. It is thus nobody’s case that humans or animals involved in scientific research can be wilfully experimented upon. It is also nobody’s claim that all institutions utilising animals for research are following the standards and norms that have evolved.

Amita Singh’s article is as full of factual inaccuracies, unwarranted innuendoes and non-sequiturs as the reports in the press regarding the raids on NII. How can you take a person seriously if she believes two tubercular monkeys in a population of 207 constitutes a tuberculosis prevalence rate of 90 per cent? What is also of interest is the issue of the worldview motivating so-called animal-lovers. It seems to be based as profoundly on a distrust of that fundamental idea of modernism and egalitarianism, as it is on a hatred of science.
All non-vegetarians are evil in this scheme of things. But concessions can perhaps reluctantly be made; some people can eat meat, but we will not touch animal skins. The link between the lynching of Dalits at Jhajjar and the politics of cow protection could not be more explicitly stated than by Giriraj Kishore of the VHP, who, justifying the Jhajjar killings, argued that the life of a cow was worth those of five Dalits.

It is also not surprising that one of the people appointed by Maneka Gandhi as the chairman of the Animal Welfare Board of India is Guman Mal Lodha, former judge of the Rajasthan High Court, and an ‘expert’ for the VHP in the Ayodhya case. Another of Gandhi’s nominees to the CPCSEA is Laxminarayan Modi, who wanted the CBI to investigate the ‘murder’ of cows. Leading the shameless agitation of the upper castes against the arrest of the murderers of Dalits now is the Haryana Gauraksha Samiti.

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It is not astonishing that those who do not believe that all humans are equal and are able to privilege animals over a vast section of human beings would attack science. Fundamental to science is the belief that there are no privileged beings at the altar of science, unlike that of religion.
Science could not have evolved in god-ordained deeply hierarchical societies, for above all, it shows us that we are all humans, frail seekers after truth. It is this that appalls Amita Singh and her ilk.