He questioned how Gandhari, the mother of Kauravas, could give birth to 100 children.

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“Mahabharat says 100 eggs were fertilised and put into 100 earthen pots. Are they not test tube babies?” he said.

HIGHLIGHTS

• He claimed the ten avatars of Lord Vishnu predate Darwin’s theory of evolution
• Stem cell research was in India thousand years ago, he said
• Ravan had 24 types of aircraft of varying sizes and capacities, he claimed

Kauravas were born due to stem cell and test tube technologies and India also possessed knowledge about guided missiles thousands of years ago, claimed Andhra University vice chancellor G Nageshwar Rao at the Indian Science Congress on Friday.

He claimed the ‘Dashavtar’, ten avatars of Lord Vishnu, predate the Theory of Evolution given by English naturalist Charles Darwin.

At a presentation, Rao said Lord Rama used ‘astras’ and ‘shastras’ (weapons), while Lord Vishnu sent a Sudardhan Chakra to chase targets. After hitting them they would come back, he said.

This shows that the science of guided missiles is not new to India and it was present thousands of years ago, the vice chancellor said.

Rao also said the Ramayana states that Ravan didn’t just have the Pushpak Viman, but had 24 types of aircraft of varying sizes and capacities. He also had several airports in Lanka and he used these aircraft for different purposes.

Rao said that as Darwin stated life started from water the first avatar of Lord Vishnu was also a fish (Matysa).

For the second avatar, he took shape of a tortoise (Kurma), an amphibious animal, the third avatar was a boar’s head and a human body (Varaha), the fourth was the Narsimha avatar with the head of a lion and human body. He took on the human form of Vaman in the fifth avatar.

He questioned how Gandhari, the mother of Kauravas, could give birth to a 100 children.

“Everybody wonders and nobody believes, how come Gandhari gave birth to 100 children. How is it humanly possible? Can a woman give birth to 100 children in one lifetime,” he asked.

“But now we believe we have test tube babies. Again Mahabharat says, 100 eggs were fertilised and put into 100 earthen pots. Are they not test tube babies? Stem cell research in this country was present thousands of years ago. Today, we speak about stem cell research.

“We had hundreds of Kauravas from one mother because of stem cell research and test tube baby technology. It happened a few thousand years ago. This was science in this country,” he said.

In another presentation, one Dr Kannan Krishnan, who claimed to be an Indian-born Australian national, sought to debunk Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Aniket Sule, Reader at the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, a part of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, said stem cell research, test tube babies, guided missiles, aircraft were very advanced technologies and any civilisation which possessed them, must also possess many simpler technologies which are absolute must for these advanced ones.

“You need electricity, metallurgy, mechanics, propulsion etc. We don’t see any evidence of these,” he said.

Sule noted that in the last few years, there has been an increasing trend of some people reinterpreting some poetic verses in old texts to extract any random meaning they want.

“That is exactly opposite of real research,” Sule added

This was not the first time that the congress has witnessed such claims. In the Mumbai session in January 2015, Anand J Bodas, principal of a pilot training school in Kerala and Ameya Jadhav, lecturer at a Mumbai junior college, presented a paper within a symposium titled ‘Ancient Sciences Through Sanskrit’. Bodas and Jadhav claimed that ancient Indians had invented aircraft that could fly in multiple directions and had even reached other planets. They cited as reference a text known as the ‘Vaimanika Shastra’, which has descriptions and some diagrams of what have been claimed to be ancient aircraft. The text, claimed to have been written by the Vedic sage Bharadwaja is, however, dated to 1904 and scientists earlier had concluded that the designs in it were unrealistic and such aircraft could not have achieved flight. Prior to the congress, noted scientists had objected to the paper being presented because of its pseudo-scientific nature.

At the same symposium, other papers were presented on ‘Engineering applications of ancient Indian botany’, ‘Neuro-science of yoga’ and ‘Advances in surgery in Ancient India’, all of which claimed ancient Indians had made fantastic inventions predating ideas in the West in the Early Modern period. Addressing delegates at the session, Union science and technology minister Harsh Vardhan claimed that ancient Indian mathematicians had discovered the Pythagoras theorem “but very gracefully allowed the Greeks to take the credit”.

At the 105th Indian Science Congress at Imphal in March 2018, Vardhan had claimed that the late British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking had stated that the Vedas contained a “theory superior to that of Einstein’s e equals mc squared equation”.

Mainstream scientists have expressed displeasure over these claims. Regarding the latest lecture by the Andhra University VC, the Indian Science Congress Association has expressed shock. “I feel very sad about the type of things he presented before the children. I had told our team to keep a check and that nothing unscientific should be spoken about from the stage. It is shocking when a person of the stature of a state university VC speaks like this,” said ISCA general president Manoj Kumar Chakrabarti, a biologist.

ISCA general secretary Premendu P Mathur said, “Science is based on citation, logical explanation and experimentation. Had I been there, I would have questioned him about it. One should have asked him for evidence.”

However, on Saturday Rao stood by his claims. “Ramayana and Mahabharata are not mythology, but history. Because we don’t understand it today, we can’t say that it’s not science

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