India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi walks into the House of Representatives to make a speech at Australia's Parliament House in Canberra, November 18, 2014. REUTERS/David Gray
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indians were flying aeroplanes, carrying out stem cell research and may even have been using cosmic weapons 5,000 years ago, according to the chairman of India's leading historical organisation.Professor Y. Sudershan Rao, the head of the Indian Council of Historical Research, has been criticised by fellow historians for comments that Hindu epics are adequate to understand the ancient world, rather than relying on evidence or research.
The Hindu nationalist government appointed Rao to the prestigious academic post soon after winning the biggest landslide in three decades, fuelling concerns of a push to teach the superiority of Hindu values and mythology at the cost of academic rigour, and cutting against the grain of secularism that runs through multi-faith modern India.
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