Indian police invoke long arm of lunar law

Police in northern India’s Uttar Pradesh state, ruled by prime minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), have employed the ancient Hindu lunar calendar in their efforts to track and combat crime.

In a recent circular, state police chief Vijay Kumar, an engineer by education, informed his force that most crimes took place each month in the “dark period”, or the week before and the week following the waxing and waning of the moon, as delineated in the Hindu calendar.

Accordingly, he instructed all district police chiefs in India’s most populous state to devise an action plan to anticipate and tackle crimes which occurred during the waning stages of the moon.

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“We conduct our activities as per the Hindu calendar, which is the easiest way to understand the phases of the moon,” said Mr Kumar, who characterised his novel crime fighting strategy as “scientific”.

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He said that according to the Hindu calendar there was a full moon on August 1st, and the entire night was bright, as a consequence of which there was little or no criminal activity across Uttar Pradesh.

In contrast, he said an assortment of crimes was carried out during the “window of darkness” in the half moon of August 8th.

Also known as the lunisolar calendar, the Hindu version has 354 days in the year, as opposed to 365 in the solar calendar which is common worldwide. However, every third year the former adds 33 days to the annual aggregate, thereby creating one additional lunar month of 29 days, with the remaining four days adjusted here and there.

Mr Kumar is not the first Indian official to invoke Hindu traditions in performing administrative duties.

One senior BJP leader even claimed the internet had existed in ancient times when the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabhatara, was written in the 3rd century BC

Since coming to power in 1014, numerous BJP leaders have deemed India’s prehistoric past to be a golden era of civilisational and scientific achievements, all of which, they claim, were subsequently decimated by centuries of Muslim and British rule.

Mr Modi told an audience of doctors and scientists in Mumbai in 2014 that plastic surgery, genetic science and stem cell study existed thousands of years ago in prehistoric India.

He said this was how the Hindu god Ganesha’s elephant head was attached to a human body and how the warrior god Kartikeya was born outside his mother’s womb.

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Other BJP leaders informed the 102nd edition of the Indian Science Congress in 2015, also held in Mumbai, that cars, aircraft and spaceships existed in the country a thousand years ago.

They said warring kings had even left behind a helmet on Mars, which they maintained had been discovered by Nasa scientists in the 20th century.

One senior BJP leader claimed the internet had existed in ancient times when the Sanskrit epic, the Mahabhatara, was written in the 3rd century BC. “It is not like internet wasn’t available in the age of Mahabharata,” Biplab Deb, former chief minister of north-eastern Tripura state said in 2018.

“The Europeans and the Americans may claim that it is their invention,” added Mr Deb, who has since become an MP, “but it is actually our [Indian] technology.”