Democratising Science ? : The People's Science Movement and the Pandemic

Abstract

Robert Merton (1938) had said that science and technology would thrive best in a liberal democratic order. As science became ‘the dominant guiding principle’ of democracy, its organised skepticism would provide society with a system of socio cultural checks and balances and a critical mindset that would ‘invalidate particular dogmas of the church, economy or the state.’  In the subcontinent, science held several meanings for a colonised people, as it was transformed into a cultural institution. Subsequently in independent India, the affirmation of a scientific temper underlying a modern nation state by Jawaharlal Nehru, established a close connection between state, science and society. However the progressive potential of science was realised on the ground through the slow but active working and nurturing of scientific ideals by the people’s science groups and movements in different parts of the country. 

This paper dwells upon the activism of one of the longest surviving people’s science movement, during the pandemic. Drawing primarily on the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad’s (or KSSP) interventions, the paper argues that the people’s science movements have played a critical role in creating a space for citizen’s participation in science. The significance of such initiatives stem from the fact that these interventions were undertaken at a time when modern scientific knowledge was under attack from the right wing forces on the one hand and science itself was beset by several uncertainties and delays on the other, especially in the context of the pandemic. The paper would elaborate the myriad ways in which the science activists of KSSP through their interventions, not only contributed to a democratisation of scientific knowledge, but also went a long way towards nurturing and affirming people’s confidence in the potential of science to some extent.