There’s no denying that there currently prevails a public culture in India that equates criticism, even well-reasoned, with pooh-poohing. It’s especially pronounced in certain geographies where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) enjoys majority support as well as vis-à-vis institutions that the subscribers of Hindu politics consider to be ripe for international renown, especially in the eyes of the country’s former colonial masters. The other side of the same cultural coin is the passive encouragement it offers to those who’d play up the feats of Indian enterprises even if they lack substantive evidence to back their claims up. While these tendencies are pronounced in many enterprises, I have encountered them most often in the spaceflight domain.

Through its feats of engineering and administration over the years, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has cultivated a deserved reputation of setting a high bar for itself and meeting them. Its achievements are the reason why India is one of a few countries today with a functionally complete space programme. It operates launch vehicles, conducts spaceflight-related R&D, has facilities to develop as well as track satellites, and maintains data-processing pipeliness to turn the data it collects from space into products usable for industry and academia. It is now embarking on a human spaceflight programme as well. ISRO has also launched interplanetary missions to the moon and Mars, with one destined for Venus in the works. In and of itself the organisation has an enviable legacy. Thus, unsurprisingly, many sections of the Hindutva brigade have latched onto ISRO’s achievements to animate their own propaganda of India’s greatness, both real and imagined.

The surest signs of this adoption are most visible when ISRO missions fail or succeed in unclear ways. The Chandrayaan 2 mission and the Axiom-4 mission respectively are illustrative examples. As if to forestall any allegations that the Chandrayaan 2 mission failed, then ISRO chairman K. Sivam said right after its Vikram lander crashed on the moon that it had been a “98% success”. Chandrayaan 2 was a technology demonstrator and it did successfully demonstrate most of those onboard very well. The “98%” figure, however, was so disproportionate as to suggest Sivan was defending the mission less on its merits than on its ability to fit into reductive narratives of how good ISRO was. (Recall, similarly, when former DCGI V.G. Somani claimed the homegrown Covaxin vaccine was “110% safe” when safety data from its phase III clinical trials weren’t even available.)

On the other hand, even as the Axiom-4 mission was about to kick off, neither ISRO nor the Department of Space (DoS) had articulated what Indian astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla’s presence onboard the mission was expected to achieve. If these details didn’t actually exist before the mission, to participate in which ISRO had paid Axiom Space more than Rs 500 crore, both ISRO and the DoS were effectively keeping the door open to picking a goalpost of their choosing to kick the ball through as the mission progressed. If they did have these details but had elected to not share them, their (in)actions raised — or ought to have — difficult questions about the terms on which these organisations believed they were accountable in a democratic country. Either way, the success of the Axiom-4 mission vis-à-vis Shukla’s participation was something of an empty vessel: a ready receptacle for any narrative that could be placed inside ex post facto.

At the same time, raising this question has often been construed in the public domain, but especially on social media platforms, in response to arguments presented in the news, and in conversations among people interested in Indian spaceflight, as naysaying Shukla’s activities altogether. By all means let’s celebrate Shukla’s and by extension India’s ‘citius, altius, fortius’ moment in human spaceflight; the question is: what didn’t ISRO/DoS share before Axiom-4 lifted off and why? (Note that what journalists have been reporting since liftoff, while valuable, isn’t the answer to the question posed here.) While it’s tempting to think this pinched communication is a strategy developed by the powers that be to cope with insensitive reporting in the press, doing so would also ignore the political capture institutions like ISRO have already suffered and which ISRO arguably has as well, during and after Sivan’s term as chairman.

For just two examples of institutions that have historically enjoyed a popularity comparable in both scope and flavour to that of ISRO, consider India’s cricket administration and the Election Commission. During the 2024 men’s T20 World Cup that India eventually won, the Indian team had the least amount of travel and the most foreknowledge on the ground it was to play its semifinal game on. At the 2023 men’s ODI World Cup, too, India played all its matches on Sundays, ensuring the highest attendance for its own contests rather than be able to share that opportunity with all teams. The tournament is intended to be a celebration of the sport after all. For added measure, police personnel were also deployed at various stadia to take away spectators’ placards and flags in support of Pakistan in matches featuring the Pakistani team. The stage management of both World Cups only lessened, rather than heightened, the Indian team’s victories.

It’s been a similar story with the Election Commission of India, which has of late come under repeated attack from the Indian National Congress party and some of its allies for allegedly rigging their electronic voting machines and subsequently entire elections in favour of the BJP. While the Congress has failed to submit the extraordinary evidence required to support these extraordinary claims, doubts about the ECI’s integrity have spread anyway because there are other, more overt ways in which the once-independent institution of Indian democracy favours the BJP — including scheduling elections according to the availability of party supremo Narendra Modi to speak at rallies.

Recently, a more obscure but nonetheless pertinent controversy erupted in some circles when in an NDTV report incumbent ISRO chairman V. Narayanan seemed to suggest that SpaceX called one of the attempts to launch Axiom-4 off because his team at ISRO had insisted that the company thoroughly check its rocket for bugs. The incident followed SpaceX engineers spotting a leak on the rocket. The point of egregiousness here is that while SpaceX had built and flown that very type of rocket hundreds of times, Narayanan and ambiguous wording in the NDTV report made it out to be that SpaceX would have flown the rocket if not for ISRO’s insistence. What’s more likely to have happened is NASA and SpaceX engineers would have consulted ISRO as they would have consulted the other agencies involved in the flight — ESA, HUNOR, and Axiom Space — about their stand, and the ISRO team on its turn would have clarified its position: that SpaceX recheck the rocket before the next launch attempt. However, the narrative “if not for ISRO, SpaceX would’ve flown a bad rocket” took flight anyway.

Evidently these are not isolated incidents. The last three ISRO chairmen — Sivan, Somanath, and now Narayanan — have progressively curtailed the flow of information from the organisation to the press even as they have maintained a steady pro-Hindutva, pro-establishment rhetoric. All three leaders have also only served at ISRO’s helm when the BJP was in power at the Centre, wielding its tendency to centralise power by, among others, centralising the permissions to speak freely. Some enterprising journalists like Chethan Kumar and T.S. Subramanian and activists like r/Ohsin and X.com/@SolidBoosters have thus far kept the space establishment from resembling a black hole. But the overarching strategy is as simple as it is devious: while critical arguments become preoccupied by whataboutery and fending off misguided accusations of neocolonialist thinking (“why should we measure an ISRO mission’s success the way NASA measures its missions’ successes?”), unconditional expressions of support and adulation spread freely through our shared communication networks. This can only keep up a false veil of greatness that crumbles the moment it brooks legitimate criticism, becoming desperate for yet another veil to replace itself.

But even that is beside the point: to echo the philosopher Bruno Latour, when criticism is blocked from attending to something we have all laboured to build, that something is deprived of the “care and caution” it needs to grow, to no longer be fragile. Yet that’s exactly what the Indian space programme risks becoming today. Here’s a brand new case in point, from the tweets that prompted this post: according to an RTI query filed by @SolidBoosters, India’s homegrown NavIC satellite navigation constellation is just one clock failure away from “complete operational collapse”. The issue appears to be ISRO’s subpar launch cadence and the consequently sluggish replacement of clocks that have already failed.

Granted, rushed critiques and critiques designed to sting more than guide can only be expected to elicit defensive posturing. But to minimise one’s exposure to all criticism altogether, especially those from learned quarters and conveyed in respectful language, is to deprive oneself of the pressure and the drive to solve the right problems in the right ways, both drawing from and adding to India’s democratic fabric. The end results are public speeches and commentary that are increasingly removed from reality as well as, more importantly, thicker walls between criticism and The Thing it strives to nurture.

Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first hit the headlines for claiming it had the support of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and reporting that both Bharat Biotech and the ICMR are yet to publish long-term safety data for Covaxin. The latter is probably moot now, with the COVID-19 pandemic well behind us, but it’s the principle that matters. Let it go this time and who knows what else we’ll be prepared to let go.

But more importantly, as The Hindu reported on May 25, the BHU study is too flawed to claim Covaxin is harmful, or claim anything for that matter. Here’s why (excerpt):

Though the researchers acknowledge all the limitations of the study, which is published in the journal Drug Safety, many of the limitations are so critical that they defeat the very purpose of the study. “Ideally, this paper should have been rejected at the peer-review stage. Simply mentioning the limitations, some of them critical to arrive at any useful conclusion, defeats the whole purpose of undertaking the study,” Dr. Vipin M. Vashishtha, director and pediatrician, Mangla Hospital and Research Center, Bijnor, says in an email to The Hindu. Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) & Professor, Departments of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University shares the same view. Given the limitations of the study one can “certainly say that the study can’t be used to draw the conclusions it does,” Dr. Menon says in an email.

Just because you’ve admitted your study has limitations doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to interpret your research data with integrity. In fact, the journal needs to speak up here: why did Drug Safety publish the study manuscript? Too often when news of a controversial or bad study is published, the journal that published it stays out of the limelight. While the proximal cause is likely that journalists don’t think to ask journal editors and/or publishers tough questions about their publishing process, there is also a cultural problem here: when shit hits the fan, only the study’s authors are pulled up, but when things are rosy, the journals are out to take credit for the quality of the papers they publish. In either case, we must ask what they actually bring to the table other than capitalising on other scientists’ tendency to judge papers based on the journals they’re published in instead of their contents.

Of course, it’s also possible to argue that unlike, say, journalistic material, research papers aren’t required to be in the public interest at the time of publication. Yet the BHU paper threatens to undermine public confidence in observational studies, and that can’t be in anyone’s interest. Even at the outset, experts and many health journalists knew observational studies don’t carry the same weight as randomised controlled trials as well as that such studies still serve a legitimate purpose, just not the one to which its conclusions were pressed in the BHU study.

After the paper’s contents hit the headlines, the ICMR shot off a latter to the BHU research team saying it hasn’t “provided any financial or technical support” to the study and that the study is “poorly designed”. Curiously, the BHU team’s repartee to the ICMR’s makes repeated reference to Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War. In the same point in which two of these references appear (no. 2), the team writes: “While a study with a control group would certainly be of higher quality, this immediately points to the fact that it is researchers from ICMR who have access to the data with the control group, i.e. the original phase-3 trials of Covaxin – as well publicized in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie. ICMR thus owes it to the people of India, that it publishes the long-term follow-up of phase-3 trials.”

I’m not clear why the team saw fit to appeal to statements made in this of all films. As I’ve written earlier, The Vaccine War — which I haven’t watched but which directly references journalistic work by The Wire during and of the pandemic — is most likely a mix of truths and fictionalisation (and not in the clever, good-faith ways in which screenwriters adopt textual biographies for the big screen), with the fiction designed to serve the BJP’s nationalist political narratives. So when the letter says in its point no. 5 that the ICMR should apologise to a female member of the BHU team for allegedly “spreading a falsehood” about her and offers The Vaccine War as a counterexample (“While ‘The Vaccine War’ movie is celebrating women scientists…”), I can’t but retch.

Together with another odd line in the latter — that the “ICMR owes it to the people of India” — the appeals read less like a debate between scientists on the merits and the demerits of the study and more like they’re trying to bait the ICMR into doing better. I’m not denying the ICMR started it, as a child might say, but saying that this shouldn’t have prevented the BHU team from keeping it dignified. For example, the BHU letter reads: “It is to be noted that interim results of the phase-3 trial, also cited by Dr. Priya Abraham in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie, had a mere 56 days of safety follow-up, much shorter than the one-year follow-up in the IMS-BHU study.” Surely the 56-day period finds mention in a more respectable and reliable medium than a film that confuses you about what’s real and what’s not?

In all, the BHU study seems to have been designed to draw attention to gaps in the safety data for Covaxin — but by adopting such a provocative route, all that took centerstage was its spat with the ICMR plus its own flaws.

Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first hit the headlines for claiming it had the support of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and reporting that both Bharat Biotech and the ICMR are yet to publish long-term safety data for Covaxin. The latter is probably moot now, with the COVID-19 pandemic well behind us, but it’s the principle that matters. Let it go this time and who knows what else we’ll be prepared to let go.

But more importantly, as The Hindu reported on May 25, the BHU study is too flawed to claim Covaxin is harmful, or claim anything for that matter. Here’s why (excerpt):

Though the researchers acknowledge all the limitations of the study, which is published in the journal Drug Safety, many of the limitations are so critical that they defeat the very purpose of the study. “Ideally, this paper should have been rejected at the peer-review stage. Simply mentioning the limitations, some of them critical to arrive at any useful conclusion, defeats the whole purpose of undertaking the study,” Dr. Vipin M. Vashishtha, director and pediatrician, Mangla Hospital and Research Center, Bijnor, says in an email to The Hindu. Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) & Professor, Departments of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University shares the same view. Given the limitations of the study one can “certainly say that the study can’t be used to draw the conclusions it does,” Dr. Menon says in an email.

Just because you’ve admitted your study has limitations doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to interpret your research data with integrity. In fact, the journal needs to speak up here: why did Drug Safety publish the study manuscript? Too often when news of a controversial or bad study is published, the journal that published it stays out of the limelight. While the proximal cause is likely that journalists don’t think to ask journal editors and/or publishers tough questions about their publishing process, there is also a cultural problem here: when shit hits the fan, only the study’s authors are pulled up, but when things are rosy, the journals are out to take credit for the quality of the papers they publish. In either case, we must ask what they actually bring to the table other than capitalising on other scientists’ tendency to judge papers based on the journals they’re published in instead of their contents.

Of course, it’s also possible to argue that unlike, say, journalistic material, research papers aren’t required to be in the public interest at the time of publication. Yet the BHU paper threatens to undermine public confidence in observational studies, and that can’t be in anyone’s interest. Even at the outset, experts and many health journalists knew observational studies don’t carry the same weight as randomised controlled trials as well as that such studies still serve a legitimate purpose, just not the one to which its conclusions were pressed in the BHU study.

After the paper’s contents hit the headlines, the ICMR shot off a latter to the BHU research team saying it hasn’t “provided any financial or technical support” to the study and that the study is “poorly designed”. Curiously, the BHU team’s repartee to the ICMR’s makes repeated reference to Vivek Agnihotri’s film The Vaccine War. In the same point in which two of these references appear (no. 2), the team writes: “While a study with a control group would certainly be of higher quality, this immediately points to the fact that it is researchers from ICMR who have access to the data with the control group, i.e. the original phase-3 trials of Covaxin – as well publicized in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie. ICMR thus owes it to the people of India, that it publishes the long-term follow-up of phase-3 trials.”

I’m not clear why the team saw fit to appeal to statements made in this of all films. As I’ve written earlier, The Vaccine War — which I haven’t watched but which directly references journalistic work by The Wire during and of the pandemic — is most likely a mix of truths and fictionalisation (and not in the clever, good-faith ways in which screenwriters adopt textual biographies for the big screen), with the fiction designed to serve the BJP’s nationalist political narratives. So when the letter says in its point no. 5 that the ICMR should apologise to a female member of the BHU team for allegedly “spreading a falsehood” about her and offers The Vaccine War as a counterexample (“While ‘The Vaccine War’ movie is celebrating women scientists…”), I can’t but retch.

Together with another odd line in the latter — that the “ICMR owes it to the people of India” — the appeals read less like a debate between scientists on the merits and the demerits of the study and more like they’re trying to bait the ICMR into doing better. I’m not denying the ICMR started it, as a child might say, but saying that this shouldn’t have prevented the BHU team from keeping it dignified. For example, the BHU letter reads: “It is to be noted that interim results of the phase-3 trial, also cited by Dr. Priya Abraham in ‘The Vaccine War’ movie, had a mere 56 days of safety follow-up, much shorter than the one-year follow-up in the IMS-BHU study.” Surely the 56-day period finds mention in a more respectable and reliable medium than a film that confuses you about what’s real and what’s not?

In all, the BHU study seems to have been designed to draw attention to gaps in the safety data for Covaxin — but by adopting such a provocative route, all that took centerstage was its spat with the ICMR plus its own flaws.

Earlier this month, a study by a team at Banaras Hindu University (BHU) in Varanasi concluded that fully 1% of Covaxin recipients may suffer severe adverse events. One percent is a large number because the multiplier (x in 1/100 * x) is very large — several million people. The study first hit the headlines for claiming it had the support of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and reporting that both Bharat Biotech and the ICMR are yet to publish long-term safety data for Covaxin. The latter is probably moot now, with the COVID-19 pandemic well behind us, but it’s the principle that matters. Let it go this time and who knows what else we’ll be prepared to let go.

But more importantly, as The Hindu reported on May 25, the BHU study is too flawed to claim Covaxin is harmful, or claim anything for that matter. Here’s why (excerpt):

Though the researchers acknowledge all the limitations of the study, which is published in the journal Drug Safety, many of the limitations are so critical that they defeat the very purpose of the study. “Ideally, this paper should have been rejected at the peer-review stage. Simply mentioning the limitations, some of them critical to arrive at any useful conclusion, defeats the whole purpose of undertaking the study,” Dr. Vipin M. Vashishtha, director and pediatrician, Mangla Hospital and Research Center, Bijnor, says in an email to The Hindu. Dr. Gautam Menon, Dean (Research) & Professor, Departments of Physics and Biology, Ashoka University shares the same view. Given the limitations of the study one can “certainly say that the study can’t be used to draw the conclusions it does,” Dr. Menon says in an email.

Just because you’ve admitted your study has limitations doesn’t absolve you of the responsibility to interpret your research data with integrity. In fact, the journal needs to speak up here: why did Drug Safety publish the study manuscript? Too often when news of a controversial or bad study is published, the journal that published it stays out of the limelight. While the proximal cause is likely that journalists don’t think to ask journal editors and/or publishers tough questions about their publishing process, there is also a cultural problem here: when shit hits the fan, only the study’s authors are pulled up, but when things are rosy, the journals are out to take credit for the quality of the papers they publish. In either case, we must ask what they actually bring to the table other than capitalising on other scientists’ tendency to judge papers based on the journals they’re published in instead of their contents.

Of course, it's also possible to argue that unlike, say, journalistic material, research papers aren't required to be in the public interest at the time of publication. Yet the BHU paper threatens to undermine public confidence in observational studies, and that can't be in anyone's interest. Even at the outset, experts and many health journalists knew observational studies don’t carry the same weight as randomised controlled trials as well as that such studies still serve a legitimate purpose, just not the one to which its conclusions were pressed in the BHU study.

After the paper’s contents hit the headlines, the ICMR shot off a latter to the BHU research team saying it hasn’t "provided any financial or technical support" to the study and that the study is “poorly designed". Curiously, the BHU team’s repartee to the ICMR's makes repeated reference to Vivek Agnihotri's film The Vaccine War. In the same point in which two of these references appear (no. 2), the team writes: "While a study with a control group would certainly be of higher quality, this immediately points to the fact that it is researchers from ICMR who have access to the data with the control group, i.e. the original phase-3 trials of Covaxin – as well publicized in 'The Vaccine War' movie. ICMR thus owes it to the people of India, that it publishes the long-term follow-up of phase-3 trials."

I'm not clear why the team saw fit to appeal to statements made in this of all films. As I've written earlier, The Vaccine War — which I haven't watched but which directly references journalistic work by The Wire during and of the pandemic — is most likely a mix of truths and fictionalisation (and not in the clever, good-faith ways in which screenwriters adopt textual biographies for the big screen), with the fiction designed to serve the BJP's nationalist political narratives. So when the letter says in its point no. 5 that the ICMR should apologise to a female member of the BHU team for allegedly “spreading a falsehood” about her and offers The Vaccine War as a counterexample ("While 'The Vaccine War' movie is celebrating women scientists…”), I can’t but retch.

Together with another odd line in the latter — that the "ICMR owes it to the people of India" — the appeals read less like a debate between scientists on the merits and the demerits of the study and more like they’re trying to bait the ICMR into doing better. I'm not denying the ICMR started it, as a child might say, but saying that this shouldn't have prevented the BHU team from keeping it dignified. For example, the BHU letter reads: "It is to be noted that interim results of the phase-3 trial, also cited by Dr. Priya Abraham in 'The Vaccine War' movie, had a mere 56 days of safety follow-up, much shorter than the one-year follow-up in the IMS-BHU study.” Surely the 56-day period finds mention in a more respectable and reliable medium than a film that confuses you about what’s real and what’s not?

In all, the BHU study seems to have been designed to draw attention to gaps in the safety data for Covaxin — but by adopting such a provocative route, all that took centerstage was its spat with the ICMR plus its own flaws.