When a Dinner Menu Becomes a Political Battle

When a Dinner Menu Becomes a Political Battle: India’s Deepening Crisis of Political Trust

From Parliament to the BRICS summit, every political disagreement is increasingly interpreted through mistrust and suspicion.

Perhaps nothing illustrates how deep the trust deficit has become better than what happened at the recently concluded BRICS Summit in New Delhi. The elaborate vegetarian dinner hosted to the leaders and delegates - showcasing India's regional culinary traditions - at the Summit, which could ordinarily have been seen simply as a choice of hospitality and cuisine, has become a media headline and an unescapable political controversy.

Science and India’s own scientific experience offer a simple lesson: trust is earned by demonstrating public purpose, not merely proclaiming it.

Mumbai, the epicentre of Ganesh festivities, is continuing to celebrate the ten day Ganesh Festival with thousands lining up to seek blessings of Bhagwan Ganesh - Lalbaugcha Raja, Mumbaicha Raja and many others including the neighbourhood Ganesh mandals, each sustained by local committees, artisans, and volunteers, complete a tradition that the world now travels to witness.

Historically, the devotees look up to Ganesh as Vighnaharta” (विघ्नहर्ता), the remover of obstacles. In India we are now encountering a different obstacle - an uncomfortable one – which our democracy urgently needs to confront: the growing deficit of trust in public life. This year, I join Mumbaikars in praying Bhagwan Ganesh – Vighnaharta, to remove the obstacle of trust deficit, which unfortunately is plaguing Indian polity, which is adversely affecting Indian society.

In the prevailing political circumstances of trust deficit, no wonder vegetarian dinner menu is being interpreted as evidence of cultural exclusion, ideological imposition or political intent. That is how dangerous a trust deficit can become, which encompasses all aspects of Indian polity.

Today, the Treasury Bench and the Opposition increasingly appear to be antagonistic to each other’s thoughts, demonstrating political realities of current times. What the government presents as reform is interpreted by the Opposition as manipulation. What the Opposition presents as scrutiny is interpreted by the government as obstruction. To add to this is the sloganeering and social media trolls and viral media messages that ghettoise society on political ideological beliefs which further accentuate the political mistrust. 

Unfortunately, caught in this political cross fire, is the credibility of the constitutional and investigative institutions—from the Election Commission and judiciary to agencies such as the CBI and ED. The result is not merely an unpleasant political atmosphere, but a weakened confidence in the democratic process itself.

We must remind ourselves that Trust, once lost, cannot be restored by louder political sloganeering.

Science offers an interesting lesson in how trust is created.

In 1854, when the safety of Lift was still viewed with suspicion, Elisha Otis demonstrated his newly devised safety brake mechanism, which he had designed for the lifts, before a packed hall of curious onlookers at the Industry of All Nations exhibition at the New York Crystal Palace.  Otis, standing on a lift platform suspended 50 feet high in the air, ordered his assistant, to cut the cable holding the lift. Instead of an expected free fall, the rope snapped and the platform dropped a few inches, and then instantly jerked to a complete halt. The safety design had worked. Otis delivered one of the most famous catchphrases in industrial history:

"All safe, gentlemen, all safe!" His words demonstrated that technology could be trusted and rest is history. That demonstration helped build trust in technology that would eventually transform high rise landscapes in cities.

Science has repeatedly shown that difficult problems become manageable when evidence, leadership and collective purpose converge. The story of polio is an even more relevant Indian example.

Jonas Salk developed the first successful inactivated polio vaccine, while Albert Sabin subsequently developed the oral vaccine that became central to mass immunisation programmes. Their scientific achievements provided the tools. But science alone could not create trust to eradicate polio in a country as vast and diverse as India.

India's success came when political leadership, public health institutions, international partners, health workers, civil society and communities trusted each other and worked towards one national objective: making India polio free. In two decades, India from reporting highest cases of world polio cases, was certified polio-free in March 2014.

The achievement was not the triumph of one government, one organisation or one scientist. It was the result of many parts of society trusting each other in achieving a common goal.

That is precisely the lesson that public life needs to rediscover.

Prafulla Chandra Ray, the great Indian chemist and institution-builder, famously observed: “Science can afford to wait, but Swaraj cannot.” The statement was not a dismissal of science. It reflected a larger principle: there are moments when personal interests and professional ambitions must be subordinated to a larger national purpose.

Jagadish Chandra Bose offered another dimension of that ethic. His pioneering work in radio waves and plant physiology brought him international recognition, yet he was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of scientific knowledge being treated merely as private property. His life reflected a belief that knowledge ultimately carries a responsibility to humanity.

Democratic public life requires precisely this sense of larger purpose.

In a democracy none of the institutional positions nor the political parties own the Republic. The people do. Every institution and every political leader, therefore, has a duty to protect the trust placed on them by the people.

The government cannot build confidence merely by announcing schemes, invoking civilisational ideals or repeating slogans. Transparency, fairness, accountability and demonstrable outcomes are what convert promises into credibility.

The Opposition has an equally important responsibility. It cannot rebuild public confidence if every government action is approached with an assumption of bad faith. Opposition is indispensable to democracy; permanent disbelief is not the same as democratic scrutiny. Criticism becomes meaningful when it engages evidence and offers an alternative.

Institutions face a similar obligation. Autonomy and independence cannot merely be claimed; it must be demonstrated. Authority may confer institutional power, but only conduct confers institutional credibility.

The Indian armed forces offer another useful lesson in leadership. Their ethos recognises that responsibility flows downwards while legitimate needs and concerns flow upwards. Those who command carry greater responsibility. Political leadership could benefit from more of that understanding: public office is ultimately a responsibility, not merely an opportunity to win the next election.

The government and Opposition do not have to trust each other's politics. They do, however, need to trust the democratic process—and demonstrate that trust through their conduct.

The Parliament must show that disagreement can coexist with deliberation. Institutions must demonstrate that their loyalty is to the Constitution, not to whoever happens to occupy office. Political leaders must show that public interest can rise above partisan advantage.

Perhaps that is the real lesson of the seemingly trivial BRICS vegetarian dinner menu controversy. It would be unfortunate if an international summit intended to showcase India's civilisational diversity became another battlefield in India's domestic political war.

India is too diverse to have one compulsory idea of food, culture, identity or ideology. But India is also too important to allow every disagreement to become an accusation of bad faith.

When trust disappears, even a menu becomes political.

When trust exists, disagreement remains disagreement.

That is the difference between a functioning democracy and a deeply polarised one.

For this year’s Ganesh Festival, perhaps the most appropriate invocation is therefore not another political slogan but a simple civic prayer: remove the obstacles to trust.

And then let our political leaders do what science and India's own experience have taught us to do—not merely speak, not merely promise, not merely accuse, but demonstrate, to create trust and learn to walk the talk.

The Republic cannot live on slogans alone. It lives on trust. And trust, like science, must ultimately be demonstrated by what we do.

Image: Courtesy Gemini AI

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Shivaprasad Khened

Senior Advisor CSMVS Museum, Mumbai.

Former Director Nehru Science Centre and NGMA Mumbai & Trustee, Gandhi Smarak Nidhi, Mumbai

 

  

Correcting a 450- plus Year-Old Distortion in World Map

Correcting a 450- plus Year-Old Distortion: Why the UN Has Now Voted to Correct the Way We Represent the World.”

For most of us, who went to school anywhere in the world over the last century, the ubiquitous world map on the classroom wall was considered to be a settled fact — fixed and unquestionable.

 The African continent sat modestly in the middle of the world map and was roughly represented by the size of Greenland or Argentina on the map. Contrarily, Europe looked expansive, larger than what it ought to be.  Russia stretched across the top of the map like a colossus. But then, none of us ever contemplated to ask why the sizes of some countries/continents are larger in map than what they really are while others appear much smaller than what they ought to be, physically. We believed the map to be a gospel truth, although it was not.

Earlier this month – September 4, 2026, the world map, which we knew it to be an absolute truth and whose genesis goes back to the 16^th century, has finally been changed to be more realistic by the United Nations through its "Correct the Map" resolution, sponsored by Togo and backed by African Union (AU) members, passed with the support of 164 nations, including India, France and the UK. The US was the only nation to vote against the resolution - while there were six abstentions.

The UN vote is non-binding but will definitely see changes to the maps used by institutions around the world. The UN General Assembly in its 114^th meeting adopted the resolution in the 80^th session, on 4 September 2026, to “” Correct the map" for rebalancing global cartographic representation and promoting equitable representation of the world's regions, particularly Africa".

The corrected world map, adopted by the UN General Assembly, has now become a formal map, non-binding, which will help us move away from that familiar image of the world map that remained extant for more than four centuries. The corrected map incorporates projections that show the true relative size of the world's continents. India voted in favour of the change, with a careful caveat about neutrality and its own territorial depiction of the geographical and political boundaries of India.

It may seem quite strange that why the world body like the UN who should have been preoccupied with many more important issues on hand - war, poverty, diplomacy etc. - chose to spend a session in its General Assembly debating a 16th-century map. To understand why the UN did so and the significance of this decision, we have to go back in history to the origin of the map, which was an outcome a Flemish cartographers design prepared nearly 450 years ago.

Cartography & Earth Maps

The world maps which we see are small scale flat-surface representation of portions of the surface of the earth. The primary purpose of a map is to express graphically the relative position of points and features on the earth's surface to each other. These maps are developed using cartography - the scientific art of making maps. The earths spherical feature makes map making difficult and involves cartography in preparation of the earth map. Cartography involves the systematic representation of all or part of a circular/spherical body on a flat surface; such a representation is called a map projection. Since earth is a circular celestial body with flat surface geographical boundaries for countries and continents, cartography is used in preparing the earth map.

A sailor's problem, solved brilliantly

In 1569, Gerardus Mercator, a cartographer working in Flanders, Belgium, published a world map designed to solve a very specific and very real problem: how does a ship's navigator draw a straight line on a flat chart and have it correspond to a constant compass bearing on a curved Earth? Sailing along lines of constant bearing — "rhumb lines", an imaginary line on earths surface that crossed all meridians of longitude at the same angle — was how ships actually navigated, and every projection before Mercator's forced captains to constantly recalculate their heading as they crossed the chart. Mercator's projection made rhumb lines appear as straight lines. During the heightened period of transoceanic voyages, this was an elegant geometric breakthrough, close to magic. It became indispensable to European maritime expansion, and deservedly so.

However, the projection technique used is achieved as a mathematical trick: it stretches the map's east-west lines of latitude farther and farther apart as you move away from the equator, in order to keep angles and shapes correct at every point (this is called a "conformal" projection). The side effect of this adoption is that area gets inflated dramatically near the poles. This results in Greenland, a modest island of about 2.2 million square kilometres, ending up looking comparable in size to Africa, a continent of over 30 million square kilometres — nearly fourteen times larger. Russia and Canada appear vastly oversized relative to their physical size. Meanwhile, the equatorial and tropical belt — Africa, South America, South and Southeast Asia — where the *actual* landmass is concentrated, is visually compressed and appears much smaller than their physical size.

Mercator, the creator of the world map which we used for more than four centuries, never claimed his map was a general-purpose atlas of the world. It was a navigational instrument. The problem arose when this map which was to be used only as a hip's chart room made its foray, over the following centuries, quietly and became the default image of the Earth in atlases, classrooms, newsrooms and now on our phone screens.

 From navigation chart to mental furniture.

Why did a specialist tool become the universal picture of the world? Partly it was inertia and familiarity: once printers and schoolbooks across Europe adopted it, it was easier to keep reproducing the extant map than to explain a less familiar alternative. Partly it was convenience: Mercator map's straight, rectangular grid is simple to print, tile and reference — you can lay north-south lines as verticals and east-west lines as horizontals without the curved, tapering edges that true equal-area projections require.

And partly — this is the reason which the UN resolution leans on — it was about who was doing the mapmaking. The projection was devised in Europe, popularised by European empires with maritime and colonial interests, and it happened to make the colonising continents look large and the colonised world look small. Historians and geographers have argued for decades, most famously Arno Peters in the 1970s with his own equal-area alternative, that this was not a neutral cartographic accident but something that shaped generations of perception: children the world over grew up absorbing, without a word being said, that the temperate global North was simply *bigger* — and by unconscious extension, more central and more important — than the tropical global South.

The digital era entrenched this further rather than correcting it. When Google Maps adopted a Mercator-based projection (the "Web Mercator") for its tiling system in 2005, virtually every major online map service followed, for the same practical reasons that made it attractive in the 16th century: rectangular tiles are simply easier to build a zoomable, pannable interface around. A projection chosen for 16th-century sailors ended up, by a very different route, shaping the maps a billion smartphones use today.

 What changes, and what doesn't, with "Correct the Map"

The resolution, "Correct the Map: Rebalancing Global Cartographic Representation and Promoting Equitable Representation of the World's Regions, Particularly Africa," was sponsored by Togo on behalf of the African Union, with the Bahamas among the co-sponsors, and built on the African Union's own adoption of the Equal Earth projection as its preferred map in March 2026. It urges member states, educational institutions, media organisations and technology companies to make greater use of equal-area projections — maps that sacrifice some accuracy in shape and angle in order to keep relative land area correct — with the Equal Earth projection, developed by a team of cartographers in 2018, offered as the leading example.

In the context of the “Map Correction” receiving heightened global media coverage and attention, it is necessary to understand that the UN resolution of a new map is not legally binding. It also does not redraw a single border nor does it forbid the use of Mercator projection, which remains genuinely useful for maritime and aerial navigation, the very purpose Mercator designed it for in 1569. What the new map does is put the UN's institutional weight behind a preference: that when a map's purpose is to help people understand the comparative scale of the world's regions — in a classroom, a newsroom graphic, a corporate map of "global markets" — an equal-area projection like “Equal Earth” tells a truer picture than Mercator projection does.

The UN resolution and the new map has found emphatic support from France's foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, who has announced that France would abandon the Mercator projection in its own materials, calling the correction an "act of truth”. However, the lone dissenter, US, who voted against the resolution “dismissed the measure as ideological theatre unworthy of the General Assembly's time, arguing the body should be focused on graver matters than four-century-old cartography”.

India's vote — support with a caveat that matters

India voted in favour of the UN Resolution, and its explanation of vote at the General Assembly is worth understanding closely. Because India feels that the resolution reflects an instinct that be it history or geography or recognising the historical scientific and technological contributions of countries like India, which was one of the major nations to be colonised by the Europeans – British – has been distorted from reality looking at it from the colonisers point of view. Therefore, while welcoming and supporting the UN resolution and the principle on which the resolution was mooted, India has not signed a blank cheque on the specifics. India's representative, Raghoo Puri, told the Assembly that “New Delhi's support was for the broader principle of equal-area projections — because they preserve the true relative size of continental and national landmasses — and explicitly not an endorsement of the Equal Earth projection as the one correct map. Further “different projections, he noted, serve different cartographic purposes, and no single one is right for every application; the resolution, in India's reading, should remain "technologically and methodologically neutral."

The Ministry of External Affairs has emphasised that “any UN-endorsed map must depict India's sovereign territory — explicitly including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh — in accordance with India's own official map, and any depiction that departs from this would be unacceptable”. This statement from the MEA is a reminder that for India, questions of cartography are never only about projection mathematics. A map is also, always, a territorial claim, and India has spent decades objecting to atlases, films and corporate maps that show its borders incorrectly. Supporting a resolution about relative size was straightforward; leaving no ambiguity about boundaries was, evidently, considered essential.

Why the New Map matters beyond the classroom wall?

As a science museum professional who has spent 4 decades in museums including to explain the physical world and India’s position to the public — in planetarium shows, Science on Sphere. a gallery of Harappan trade networks, a hall of industrial technology etc. — I firmly believe that if there is one thing that experience teaches you, it is that the tools we use to represent reality are never fully innocent of the choices behind them. They come with the biases of the users of the tools which is so deeply impregnated in their minds. This could also be the case for the Mercator Maps that we use, which unwittingly favour certain nations and continents while doing injustice to others, when it comes to representing their relative sizes on the map.   A projection is a decision about what to sacrifice: shape, angle, distance or area cannot all be preserved simultaneously on a flat map of a round Earth, so every cartographer chooses what matters most. Mercator, for his purpose, chose angle and shape, and his choice is quite reasonable looking at the time when he did this and for the purpose for which he did this, sailing the seas. What is, however, less reasonable was letting the 16th-century sailor's choice silently become every child's unexamined image of how large their own continent or country is in relation to the other world.

The Equal Earth projection will not solve global inequity, and no one seriously claims it will. What a fairer map can do — modestly, but not trivially — is stop quietly telling a few generations of schoolchildren in countries like India or African continent, and Indonesia that their part of the world is smaller and, by visual implication, less consequential than it actually is. "A fair map does not change the geography of the world," Togo's foreign minister said at the UN, "it changes how we see the world." After nearly 450 years of an unexamined convention, that seems a modest enough ask — and a correction well worth making.

Let us welcome the new map, which in some sense tries to correct the wrong perception of the relative sizes of the nations that was reflected in the old maps.

It must also be remembered that the distortion was not just in map representation which intentionally or unqittingly, favoured an eurpean narrative but also in most aspects of history more particularly history of science and technology, where contributions of ancient civilisations like India, have more or less forgotten or at best find a foor note mention, which too needs to be corrected. When and how will this be done to correct the long held distortion is something which time alone will reveal, until then let us welcome the UN change in map correction.