The Indian right has integrated the promotion of alternative medicine into nationalist politics, but at what cost? Yusra Khan.
HAlternative medicines promising quick results — Elval eye drops to “cure” cataracts, coffee enemas for detoxification, magnetic therapy for pain relief — have long been popular in India. But over the past decade, these treatments — sometimes outright quacks — have been elevated by nationalistic nostalgia promoted by an hardline government. Empirical science is often loudly denounced by those in power, and the risks to public health are clear.
In Indian academia, “decolonization” has become an increasingly common banner for the Hindu right. These hardliners have been successful in forcibly linearizing anti-imperialism and contemporary ultranationalism, and medicine has become a convenient front on which these battles are being waged.
The exuberant narrative of cultural revival put forward by India’s far-right leaders has been bolstered by ingenious marketing. Just six months after he was first elected prime minister in May 2014, Narendra Modi elevated AYUSH, a former government agency, to a ministry with a huge budget. AYUSH is an acronym for Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddhi and Homeopathy, which encompasses a range of ancient alternative medical systems that are the first line of defense for around 70 percent of India’s population.
Ayurveda, a form of medicine dating back thousands of years, discusses the human body’s internal healing system and relies on the constitution (prakriti) and life forces (doshas) of the human body as the primary basis for treatment. In India, Ayurvedic practices, which rely heavily on the authority of ancient texts, have managed to gain state patronage by circumventing the basic requirement of establishing efficacy through statistically sound methods.
The backing of prominent officials has led to further publicity, sometimes with disastrous results: For example, the Ministry of AYUSH continues to ignore the issue of heavy metals in Ayurvedic preparations, even though studies have shown that their use can lead to liver damage.
The government’s enthusiasm for AYUSH has a strong ideological motivation, promoting a singular conception of the past to support healing claims in the present. The investment is strongly linked to an ancient medical framework that places Ayurveda at the center of the narrative as an example of India’s glorious past. This celebration of Hindu history is essential to Hindutva, the far-right religious ideology supported by the state under Modi.
The prevalence of health misinformation has never been more evident than during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when elected representatives of the government garnered international attention by prescribing home remedies made from kitchen spices as preventative measures and organising cow urine drinking parties (cows are sacred to Hindus).
Ayush-64, an Ayurvedic pill previously prescribed to treat malaria, has been adapted and promoted as a treatment for mild COVID-19 cases. Mobilizing scarce resources, a national campaign has been launched to distribute the drug in large quantities. Critics argue that the evidence supporting the drug is weak due to low-quality small sample studies, which also highlights the regulatory problems plaguing the Ayush pharmaceutical industry.
Baba Ramdev, a yoga practitioner who has built a vast business empire and has friends in both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its media sycophants, has made a fortune promoting a herbal concoction called Coronil, which he claimed could prevent and cure COVID-19, with deadly consequences. Ramdev has a long history of inflammatory rhetoric, heavily amplified by the media, disparaging allopathic medicines and promoting “cures” for a range of ailments, including cancer.
Lack of scrutiny
Colonization had a devastating effect on India, claiming millions of lives, robbing wealth, oppressing and dividing its people. In theory, the call for “decolonization” — any kind of dissolution of colonialism and its effects — is a positive move. But Narendra Modi and right-wing nationalists have hijacked the idea to promote their own religious nationalism and continued politics of divide and rule.
Historical resentments over limited or distorted colonialism have helped to form a defensive shield against criticism of AYUSH-based methods, with mainstream approaches being dismissed as Western influences, while public funds are pumped into a health system that continues to avoid accountability.
In theory, the call for “decolonisation” – somehow dismantling colonialism and its effects – is a positive move. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi and right-wing nationalists have hijacked the idea to promote their own version of religious nationalism and a continuing politics of divide and rule.
Science historian Meera Nanda has been a vocal critic of Hindutva. She explains why the current situation is different from the official support for alternative medicine that has always existed in India: “The way this government has institutionalized traditional medicine and censored critical voices is uniquely dangerous,” she explains. “The Congress and other non-Bharatiya Janata parties may pay lip service to indigenous traditions, but the Bharatiya Janata Party has turned it into a first principle of social policy.”
Brajesh Pathak, deputy chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, claimed in 2023 that homeopathy, which originated in Germany and was introduced to India in the early 19th century, could cure stage two cancer without any side effects.
Baba Ramdev performs yoga at the Sangam, the confluence of three holy rivers — the Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati — during the Kumbh Mela festival in Prayagraj, India, on January 28, 2019. Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP/Alamy
Nanda adds that a strong, almost religious, current of faith in Ayurveda and other traditional medicines cuts across class and education levels. “It is based on two assumptions: first, that Ayurveda is safe because it is ‘natural’, whereas modern medicine is ‘chemical’ and therefore harmful to the human body and fraught with unexpected risks and side effects. And second, that traditional medicine has been proven over centuries, so it must be safe and effective.” This idea is further reinforced by the government through a consistent rhetoric of cultural superiority that fetishizes indigenous practices, belittles evidence-based scientific approaches, and removes them from the purview of public scrutiny.
Pseudoscience
In criticising far-right enthusiasm for alternative medicines, we must be careful not to get the cart before the horse: many would be opposed to generalisations that could undermine access to established non-allopathic medicines.
Madhulika Banerjee, a professor at the University of Delhi’s School of Political Science, has done significant work in the field of alternative knowledge systems, primarily Ayurveda. She says, “We need to get out of the narrow framework that the current government has set… These are systems with a large base of both practice and production, the former very ancient and even the latter over 100 years old. To tarnish all of them with the same brush and lump them together with the charlatans protected by the current government would be a very poor analysis.”
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The conflation of pseudoscientific health claims and spirituality offers the right several benefits, chief among them a sense of moral righteousness and lack of accountability: the former pervades government rhetoric and the confidence of alternative medicine marketers, the latter unfortunately codified in Indian policy and law.
Under the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, the rules for issuing manufacturing licences for Ayurvedic, Siddhi and Unani (ASU) medicines are relatively loose and rudimentary compared to allopathic preparations. The government confirmed this in a notification issued in July 2018, stating that clinical trials and safety study reports are not mandatory for patented and proprietary ASU medicines.
A large retrospective multi-centre study conducted in 2022 confirmed earlier findings of a quiet but unnoticed increase in herb-induced liver injury from Giloy (also known as Guduchi), a prized herb in Ayurveda. This climbing herb with heart-shaped leaves is native to the Indian subcontinent and has a range of nutritional properties, but the relentless push as an “immune booster” has led to the indiscriminate use of this herb and many commercial herbal products. At the peak of the pandemic, Haridwar-headquartered Ayurvedic major Patanjali, which sells several such products, saw its consumer goods business boom, increasing sales by around 25% from 2021 to 2022.
In a rare move, the company founded by Baba Ramdev is currently being grilled in Indian courts over its long history of misleading advertising. In 2022, the Indian Medical Association filed a lawsuit against Ramdev over his dangerous claims that belittled the modern healthcare system. In the midst of a global pandemic, the yogi-turned-business mogul finally prompted the association to act by declaring to his thousands of followers that “far more people have died from allopathic medicine than from lack of oxygen.”
He struck a nerve by tapping into the (often justified) growing public distrust of big pharmaceutical companies. In recent years, the dangers of this kind of cultural renaissance have become clear in a country where anti-science sentiment is quite widespread and alternative medicines are more affordable than more modern alternatives.
Figures released in 2020 show that India spends less than 4% of its budget on healthcare, one of the lowest in the world. Nanda says it’s not clear whether traditional medicine’s continued popularity reflects real ownership or pragmatic decision-making. “In the name of preserving traditions and ‘decolonising’ India from Western influences, the current government is pumping money into setting up Ayurvedic clinics instead of providing real healthcare. The irony is that when the bigwigs themselves get sick, they check into state-of-the-art medical facilities. It’s a cruel joke.”
