Aggregated News
Image by Naveed Ahmed from Unsplash
Despite the tremendous diversity of languages and cultures in India, we are all but leaves of the same tree – migrants and mixed. The genome data that we have of Indians show that there are no genetic differences between caste groups. Tribals too are not some isolated communities.
“Tribals are us,” as Tony Joseph reminds us.
Yet the utopia of a Hindu cultural field and race, free from the Muslims, is rife, nourished by the far right ideologies and politics in contemporary India. Those ideals don’t fall too far from what is categorised as negative eugenics.
When we speak of citizenship, the subject of race is not far away. The affinity between race and citizenship can also be explored with the term ‘eugenics’ that Francis Galton coined in the late 19th century.
Eugenics is largely an immoral pseudoscience that believes in producing ‘perfect’ people or racial improvement through genetics. It is a belief in the purity of humans and is derived from the Greek word eugenes which means ‘good in birth’ or ‘good in stock’...