
March 05, 2014
Pressing news, random facts and other summings up of recent events in the world that counts.
Pressing news, random facts and other summings up of recent events in the world that counts.
Trained practitioners warn that unregulated yoga can be detrimental to people's health. The government in India, where the ancient practice was invented, knows this very well — yet continues to postpone regulation.
Prime Minister Modi at a mass yoga demonstration in Lucknow, India
NEW DELHI — Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the observance of the eighth International Yoga Day from Mysuru, in southwestern India, early on the morning of June 21. Together with his colleagues from the Bharatiya Janata Party, he set out to mark the occasion in various parts of the country — reviving an annual ritual that had to take a break for the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yoga is one of the five kinds of alternative Indian medicine listed under India’s AYUSH efforts — standing for "Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and naturopathy, and Homeopathy." Among them, only yoga is yet to be regulated under any Act of Parliament: All other practices are governed by the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine (NCISM), Act 2020.
Yoga and naturopathy are taught at the undergraduate level in 70 medical colleges across 14 Indian states. The Mangalore University in Karnataka first launched this course in 1989; today, these subjects are also taught at the postgraduate level.
The institutes that offer these classes aren’t considered on the fringe and the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences also offers PhD courses on the topic.
Yet, despite this history of formal training, yoga and naturopathy practitioners aren’t required by any national Act to register before they start practicing. Meaning that no one can be held liable for practicing without a licence — whether they have completed a full-time course, have a few weeks’ certificate course under their belt, or haven't studied anything at all.
Seventeen states have passed their own registration laws, but in the absence of a national Act, a practitioner registered in one state cannot practice in another, making the effect of the registrations uneven.
The remaining states don’t have any regulations in any case — which could allow “a number of quack practitioners” to mushroom “with the growing demand for yoga and naturopathy clinical practice, putting the public at large at risk of malpractice and bad health,” as a Parliamentary committee had warned back in November 2019.
The Indian Naturopathy and Yoga Graduates’ Medical Association (INYGMA) has been aware of these ill-effects in the course of its work. Its president, Naveen Visweswaraiah, and vice-president, Rajesh Kumar Singh, said they encounter people almost every day suffering from a condition that was made worse by a misguided, unregistered practitioner.
“If a person with hypertension practices Kapalbhati, their blood pressure will shoot up,” Visweswaraiah told The Wire Science. They “may also get a stroke, but untrained or insufficiently-trained yoga practitioners don’t tell this to people.”
India, the country that gave the world yoga, is not interested in regulating its practice.
Similarly, Bhastrika (also known as hyperventilation) can trigger seizures in people suffering from epilepsy, he said. “Now when [a person suffering from seizures] comes to us, we make them do Bhastrika while we run an electroencephalogram , so we know which part of their brain is creating the problem. "But," he added, "we do this in the extremely controlled settings of a lab. If an [undiagnosed] patient is sitting in a yoga class, they can actually get a seizure because of Bhastrika. They can die. And people will think it happened just like that.”
According to Singh, the vice-president: “There are centres distributing brochures that claim they can 100% treat a disease with yoga, while it might not be possible in that condition. All this is happening and we, the trained doctors, are helpless.”
It is not difficult to understand why yoga needs to be regulated, Visweswaraiah and Singh said, comparing yoga to a drug: Just as a drug has contraindications and dose limits, so does the practice of yoga. "More is better" doesn’t work and is often harmful.
But in the absence of registration — let alone a law governing the practice of yoga — discussing dosage, indications and side-effects if off the table right now.
The UK, the U.S. and Australia have been reporting the potential adverse effects of yoga. But India, the country that gave the world yoga, is not interested in regulating its practice — both as a fitness regimen and as a medicinal system.
The Indian government might disagree, however. [AYUSH Ministry Secretary Rajesh Kotecha is yet to respond to a list of questions The Wire Science had sent him.] This is because the government has been kicking the yoga regulation can down the road for eight years.
Narendra Modi became India’s prime minister for the first time in May 2014; by December of that year, had transformed the Department of AYUSH into a Union ministry. But in the meantime, the Department had sent a letter to the health secretaries of all states, warning them that the Union government was planning on regulating the teaching and practice of yoga under the same Act that covered all other alternative systems.
This was the Indian Medical Central Council Act 1970. But fast forward six years, when the government replaced this Act with the NCISM Act (with no significant progress in the time that had elapsed), regulating yoga and naturopathy was no longer part of the document's scope.
The government’s rationale, which was provided to a standing committee in charge of evaluating the NCISM Bill, was that yoga and naturopathy are “drugless” — unlike the other AYUSH practices, meaning they couldn’t be regulated by the same bill.
“The committee is not at all convinced by the reasons given by the ministry,” the committee members wrote in their report, which ended with a recommendation to include a specific clause, in the same bill, pertaining to yoga and naturopathy.
The AYUSH ministry ignored this recommendation. It also ignored a 2017 NITI Aayog report which said, “Given the increasing recognition for yoga and naturopathy in potentially making an important contribution towards health promotion, well-being and disease prevention, we have recommended their inclusion in the NCISM.”
It seems like the AYUSH Ministry made a point of overlooking the recommendations of a wealth of reports. More than 50 members of Parliament, from both sides of the political spectrum, wrote to Prime Minister Modi in 2020 asking him to regulate the practice of yoga and naturopathy. The Indian Naturopathy and Yoga Graduates’ Medical Association has also appeared before several government committees and made representations to the AYUSH ministry.
[The Wire Science has copies of all the relevant reports and the letters by some of the MPs.]
On May 19, 2022, the Union ministry wrote that “A [separate] bill with respect to regulating and standardizing the education and practice of Yoga and Naturopathy is under consideration in this Ministry.”
The same ministry had told a Parliamentary committee three years earlier that it had decided to not have a separate Bill “to empower the existing mechanism of National Board for Promotion and Development of Yoga and Naturopathy under Ministry of AYUSH to strengthen the aspects of regulating education and practice of yoga and naturopathy”.
This is like certifying quacks even if they don’t become doctors.
“It's a lollipop that has been served to us for ages now,” INYGMA’s Kumar said. “They have never shared a draft [of this bill]” nor specified “which government board or committee recommended to them that a separate bill be needed.”
If the ministry had been serious, Kumar added, it would have at least consulted INYGMA and other similar groups, since they have been fighting for regulations for almost a decade under the Modi government.
Kumar himself doesn’t want a separate bill — just like the Parliamentary committee didn’t. Their reason is that doing so would require a separate commission to monitor its implementation, which in turn would have significant financial implications for a sector that concerns fewer than 3,000 people.
The ministry also said that yoga and naturopathy were not fit to be considered Indian "systems of medicine’" because, once again, they don't involve drugs. This is a strange argument, especially since Prime Minister Modi has made yoga a staple of his message of national pride.
This said, the AYUSH ministry created a "Yoga Certification Board" through a simple communiqué in 2018. This board introduced multiple certificate courses ranging from a few hours to a couple weeks. The courses have no prerequisite qualifications, except having graduated from high school.
“This is like certifying quacks even if they don’t become doctors,” Visweswaraiah said.
This board isn’t much different from other centers around the country — and all of them still function beyond the remit of a law or policy that specifies what is good yoga and what isn’t. This in turn keeps the spotlight on the absence of such law or policy and the Indian government’s reluctance to regulate yoga.
Prime Minister Modi used the first and second Yoga Days to build soft power for India and included other countries in its observance. But if yoga practitioners are demanding something as basic as regulation on the eighth Yoga Day, it’s hard to believe the difficulties lie in framing the text, especially for a government as shrewd as the current one.
Trained practitioners warn that unregulated yoga can be detrimental to people's health. The government in India, where the ancient practice was invented, knows this very well — yet continues to postpone regulation.
The head of the Kremlin boasted at the recent forum in St. Petersburg International Economic Forum about Russia’s economic resilience against Western sanctions. But behind the scenes, Russian business leaders tell a different story.
With the complicity of leftist rulers in Venezuela, Bolivia and even Argentina, Iran's sanction-ridden regime is spreading its tentacles in South America, and could even undermine democracies.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.