The New Indian Express (TNIE) had recently published a report which claimed that the Central Cultural Ministry is going to study ‘Racial Purity of Indians’. It talked about the Ministry of Culture looking forward to acquiring state-of-the-art DNA profiling kits and machines to trace the genetic history and ‘trace the purity of races in India’.
The ‘Purity of Races’ angle in the article comes from the quote of Prof. Vasant Shinde, who serves as the adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bengaluru. Shinde notes that his team wants to study the mutation and mixing of genes that has happened in the last 10,000 years. While genetic mutation talks about the interaction of Indians with other populations of the world, studying the same will give us a clear-cut idea of our genetic history.
In the TNIE article, the news of the investigation to trace the genetic history of the Indian population was conflated with researchers studying the ‘purity’ of races in India. While the concept of ‘race’ remains purely a social concept and has no biological basis, purity here meant tracing the origins of DNA haplogroups among the Indian population. The deliberate contestation of the two led quite a stir among readers who were perplexed at the unscientific claims of the article. Soon, The Ministry of culture categorically dismissed the article as ‘misleading’.
However, it was for Congress MLA Rahul Gandhi to quote the report that was already labelled ‘factually...
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