Ranjani Ramesh
– Alternative medicine in post-independence India has, over the last several decades, graduated from the fringes to the mainstream. Since 2014, however, there have been rapid developments on this front under the Narendra Modi government formed by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (“BJP”, Indian People’s Party). These developments led to a string of concerning policy decisions. Civil society decries the state’s push to integrate AYUSH[1] (an acronym for Ayurveda, Yoga, Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa-Rigpa and Homeopathy) with clinical healthcare. While there is a larger discussion to be had over India’s crumbling public healthcare sector[2] and the misdirected attempts at fixing it with pseudoscience, this article takes a panoramic look at the ongoing efforts to revive alternative medicine in India under a state crime lens.
Retreat from scientific temper: when extraordinary claims don’t require extraordinary evidence
The department of Indian System of Medicine and Homeopathy (as AYUSH was then called) was first set up in 1995[3] as part of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare under the Indian National Congress-led government. In 2014, within the first two hundred days of Modi’s premiership, the Indian government elevated the department of AYUSH to a ministry.[4] One of the Ministry of AYUSH’s now renamed Ministry of Ayush;[5] hereinafter “MoA” or “Ministry”) stated purposes is “revival of the profound knowledge of our ancient systems of medicine”.[6]
The language of “revival” situates the MoA’s purpose within a longer nationalist project of the BJP. It rests on the invocation of an imagined “golden Vedic era” – a lost era of indigenous scientific mastery, eroded under the Mughal and European rule, to which the nation must now “return.”[7] This rhetoric aligns with the wider Hindutva call to recover a suppressed Hindu identity.[8] The Ministry’s appeal to “the profound knowledge of our ancient systems of medicine” casts the revival of AYUSH as the restoration of a civilisational heritage that already possessed, or even surpassed, the insights of clinical medicine.[9] Revivalism of alternative medicine under a Hindu-nationalist government thus dresses jingoistic declarations about AYUSH (its origins and impacts) in the borrowed language of postcolonialism, presenting it as decolonisation of medical science.[10]
Consequently, taxpayer money started to get poured into proving (instead of verifying) the efficacy of AYUSH claims. As opposed to clinical medicine which requires one to maintain scientific scepticism throughout research, AYUSH research begins with the presumption of the correctness of “ancient knowledge”. For instance, millions of rupees were spent across several ministries, government departments and research institutes to fund large-scale research aimed at proving curative properties of cow-derivatives (especially, urine and dung).[11] There is a concerted effort to set up treatment centres and educational institutions dedicated to AYUSH. Under the National AYUSH Mission, the central government released funds to the tune of ₹64 billion (~£600 million) to states and union territories to develop AYUSH infrastructure, including colleges and hospitals.[12]
As per a recent MoA report showing figures from 2023, there are about 932 undergraduate and 254 postgraduate colleges[13] dedicated to teaching AYUSH through courses regulated by the National Commission for Indian System of Medicine (“NCISM”)[14] and the National Commission for Homeopathy.[15] They saw an annual intake of 69,497 undergraduate students and 7,654 postgraduate students.[16] Since 2014, there has been an 83% and a 92% jump in the total number of AYUSH educational institutions, respectively.[17] There are 3,885 hospitals with registered AYUSH practitioners, and 37,804 dispensaries selling AYUSH drugs across the country, and over 70% of them are in the government sector.[18]
The AYUSH multiverse promotes (despite a lack of empirical evidence) magnet therapy for ailments,[19] cow urine as a bioenhancer for antibiotics and anti-cancer drugs,[20] panchagavya[21] as a cure for ailments such as leprosy, psoriasis and arthritis,[22] and believes that cow milk contains trace amounts of gold.[23] A steady stream of outlandish AYUSH “success stories” has normalised the incredible, potentially lowering the threshold for what the public is willing to believe. Fazio et al. demonstrated through their research on the effects of illusory truth that the more often a claim is encountered, the more believable it becomes, even when implausible or contradicted by what audiences already know.[24] When repetition comes from the state, official endorsement lends these claims the authority of science, eroding scientific temper. Once the government has made the improbable respectable, claims from anyone else, official or otherwise, meet far less resistance, and cow urine eye drops[25] or cow urine parties[26] are not met with serious widespread pushback.
Suppression of scientific dissent
Doctors and scientists have long argued that alternative medicine is not held up to the rigours of evidence-based clinical medicine and have tested the claims of AYUSH medicine independently, publishing their findings in various forms – from peer-reviewed journals to social media posts. One of the most striking responses from the state was the 2019 advisory from the MoA[27] issued for “protecting the public perception of AYUSH” pursuant to “arbitrary statements and unfounded conclusions” in scientific studies published by non-AYUSH researchers “to damage the credibility of the whole system”. It placed AYUSH beyond scrutiny, testable only by its own research centres and understood only through its own guidelines. It advised researchers, journal editors and others to involve AYUSH experts or institutions in studies of AYUSH drugs and treatments and in vetting findings before publication to prevent “incorrect, arbitrary and ambiguous” statements or conclusions. While the advisory is not legally binding, the state’s intentions could not be clearer – discredit all researchers in a sweeping statement, question their motives and reinforce the circularity of AYUSH’s claims which runs like: it is true, therefore it must be true. This is not just vilification of legitimate criticism, but also pre-emptive suppression of scientific dissent.
The MoA has often used the threat of defamation against its critics. Dr Cyriac Abby Philips, a hepatologist from India’s southern state of Keralam and one of the most prominent critics of alternative medicine, has been a recurring target. In 2021, the Ministry threatened defamation proceedings over his comments questioning the herb giloy’s safety.[28] In June 2026, a statutory body under the Ministry issued a circular warning him against calling homeopaths “quacks”. Within hours of Dr Philips’s sardonic response to the circular on Instagram, his post was blocked in India pursuant to a “legal requirement”.[29]
Perhaps the most organised dissent has come from the Indian Medical Association (“IMA”), the country’s largest body of clinical-medicine practitioners which has challenged AYUSH claims in public and in courts. Its most prominent intervention was a 2022 petition before the Indian Supreme Court against Patanjali Ayurved Limited[30] (“Patanjali”), the AYUSH sector’s largest company co-founded by the government-aligned yoga celebrity Ramdev, over advertising its drug “Coronil” as a cure for COVID-19 and for disparaging clinical medicine as responsible for mass-deaths during the pandemic by taking advantage of public anxieties concerning Big Pharma.[31] Eventually, the MoA moved to delete Rule 170 of the Drugs and Cosmetics Rules, 1945, which required pharmaceutical companies to obtain prior approval of advertisements of AYUSH drugs.[32] Prior to such deletion, legal safeguards existed at both ends of the advertisement cycle – (1) the requirement to obtain approval under Rule 170 before publication of an advertisement promoting AYUSH drugs and (2) monitoring drugs for false and misleading advertisements after they enter the market under the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements) Act, 1954. With Rule 170 being deleted, the first safeguard is not available. The Ministry claimed to strengthen measures for consumer protection by bringing additional checkpoints.[33] However, as a result of the deletion of Rule 170, state intervention for advertisements arrives only after an AYUSH drug enters the market and upon investigation, it is found that its advertisement was false or misleading. This is particularly concerning because by the time the state machinery catches up, misleading advertisements would have led to sale and consumption of such drugs across regions. This is made worse by the fact that even when both legal safeguards were in force, state action was abysmally low.[34]
Between late 2020[35] and early 2021[36], the IMA organised nationwide strikes opposing an MoA notification[37] that authorised AYUSH practitioners to independently perform fifty-eight different types of medical procedures including surgeries. It was of the view that such a move encroached into the expertise of clinical medicine, jeopardising patient care and public health.[38] It expressed concerns that the notification was peppered with terminologies borrowed from clinical medicine,[39] thereby creating a façade of credibility. Soon after initial backlash, the Ministry issued a clarification,[40] brushing aside criticism as misinformation and attributed it to misreporting and incorrect interpretation of the notification. It referred to a 2016 notification which required students under certain specified streams of Ayurveda to receive “training of investigative procedures, techniques and surgical performance of procedures and management”, and stated that the 2020 notification was merely an amendment to the former – that is, the 2016 notification required students to get trained (which did not find much resistance then, possibly because mere training was not perceived as harmful), and the 2020 notification authorised them to go on to perform surgeries independently after completion of their course. The 2016 notification was the foot in the door through which the Ministry wriggled in a larger change with the 2020 notification with far greater consequences and this was perceived by clinical practitioners as patently harmful to society. The Ministry justified the use of “standardised terminologies” as “inheritances of the entire mankind”, and that they did not belong solely to clinical medicine, and that it helped “facilitate communication among different stakeholders,” such as “medico-legal, health IT, insurance”.[41]
One of the primary concerns raised by the IMA was that the National Medical Commission (“NMC”) – a statutory body under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare that oversees education of clinical medical in India, grants doctors their certificates of practice and enforces ethical standards[42] was never consulted before the 2020 notification.[43] This is particularly alarming because the 2020 notification was passed by a wholly different statutory body under a different ministry, namely the MoA, permitting Ayurveda practitioners to perform the kind of medical procedures that the NMC concerns itself with. The IMA eventually took this issue to the Supreme Court,[44] and so did the Association of Medical Consultants that challenged the 2020 notification on the ground that it violates the fundamental right to life guaranteed in the Indian Constitution.[45] However, the cases continue to be pending. Because the Supreme Court did not direct an interim stay on the notification during the pendency of the case, a few states[46] went ahead and gave effect to the notification. This legal limbo has created an irreversible reality where AYUSH students are being trained to perform medical procedures, with the authorisation to carry that training into their practice.
In mid-2025, the IMA vociferously opposed the proposal to integrate Ayurveda with clinical medical education, urging the state to “refrain from producing hybrid doctors who will only be qualified quacks” and that it takes away a patient’s choice to elect an unadulterated medical system.[47] The Union Minister of State for Health and AYUSH announced the proposal during an official visit to a government-owned premier medical university.[48] The proposal was spearheaded by Auroville Foundation, and notably neither the NMC nor its AYUSH counterpart (NCISM) were involved in the process.[49] Predictably, the Ministry did not directly engage with criticism. However, following backlash, the medical university denied such reports and stated that there was “no move to introduce any such programme”;[50] yet right-to-information requests revealed that the university was actively evaluating the proposal.[51]
As can be seen from the above, the MoA’s response to scientific dissent has been to deny in generalised statements, double down on AYUSH’s sacrosanctity, project legitimate critics as bad actors, threaten to initiate litigation, revoke legal safeguards, bypass regulatory bodies and build consent by invoking a sense of pride over an ancient past. The lack of efforts to critically engage with the perspectives of medical practitioners in India to understand how the Ministry’s moves could impact public health could not be possible without a pervasive state acquiescence to allow ideological interference in public institutions.
Medical disinformation and state culpability
Disinformation is intentional misinformation. It requires a source that knows, or has the means to know, that a claim is false or misleading and disseminates it regardless. The Indian state has both – it commands research institutions and regulatory bodies, and it has public health expertise sufficient to determine what is scientifically sound. When it chooses instead to fund and promote alternative medicine that does not meet the evidentiary standards of clinical research, it allows an ideological takeover of medicine, thereby abdicating one of the most fundamental responsibilities of the state, namely, public health.
Science historian Meera Nanda’s account of ‘strategic inclusivism’ explains why this cannot be mistaken for genuine revival of alternative medicine.[52] She borrows the term from Paul Hacker and Wilhelm Halbfass, who described a style of argument that “claims for one’s own worldview what actually belongs to a rival system, while treating that system’s own insights as a lower stage on the way to one’s own deeper truth”[53] Applied to medicine, the argument runs: the state promotes the view that modern medicine has only now discovered what India’s sages already knew and knew more completely.[54] Through this takeover, the state ascribes to AYUSH the prestige of modern science while placing AYUSH’s foundational claims permanently beyond the reach of the scrutiny that such prestige demands.[55] Decolonisation of a knowledge system requires an underlying cultural change; a willingness to rebuild that system from within and hold it to the same standard as everything else.[56] Hindu nationalism has instead climbed onto the shoulders of decolonisation’s language without doing any of this work,[57] using it to advance an ideological project rather than a scientific one. Revivalism then becomes a façade with which the state engineers a semblance of proof to serve a purpose that has little to do with medicine.
One of the clearest examples of how the state does not merely have the means to know, but has actually known, lies in the Coronil episode. In February 2021, Patanjali launched Coronil as a cure for COVID-19. A huge poster at the event stated that Coronil was granted the “Certificate of Pharmaceutical Product” under the World Health Organisation’s Good Manufacturing Practice scheme[58], which in itself was not a validation of the drug’s efficacy. Coronil’s launch event was attended by the Union Minister for Health and the Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways.[59] Earlier that day, Patanjali’s Ramdev went on to state on a Hindi TV news channel that a team from the World Health Organisation (WHO) had visited their office and certified Coronil to be fit for a license that would allow it to be sold in 150 countries, a claim which was publicly disavowed by WHO in a matter of hours.[60] Soon after, Patanjali walked back its wording.[61] Yet, the Union Minister for Health did not retract his endorsement – at a time when the country was at the threshold of the deadliest wave of the pandemic. More damning still, the state’s own drug regulator had declined to recognise Coronil as a cure the previous year, clearing it only as a “supporting measure”.[62] The state therefore held, within its own regulatory record, the knowledge that the claim being celebrated from a public platform contradicted its own assessment and lent that platform the sanction of the Health Ministry regardless. Disinformation here is therefore the knowing choice to let misinformation spread despite having every means to verify, stop, or correct it. A state-corporate nexus to benefit from medical disinformation is hard to ignore. For instance, just a month after this debacle, a BJP-led government in the state of Haryana bought a hundred thousand Coronil kits from Patanjali with public funds for free distribution to patients.[63]
Medical disinformation harms in a way other kinds of disinformation do not, because it acts directly on the body. It is also a domain where people are required to act based on what they are told, and they often do not have the resources to verify it themselves or to shop for opinions. A person misled about a treatment’s safety is exposed to physical risk they did not knowingly accept and is denied the informed choice on which any decision about their own body rests. The physical harms of unproven medicine are the province of clinicians and medical researchers who are best placed to address them. The harm this article concerns itself with is epistemic: the harm of disinformation itself.
The public has a right not to be misled about matters that determine their health and survival. The harm is compounded when the source of disinformation is the state. A private quack can be called out by the medical community and civil society; here the state promotes what researchers say are unscientific and perhaps dangerous to patient safety, pours public money to manufacture proof for its claims, and moves to suppress scientific dissent. Green and Ward define state crime as “state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights.”[64] A public deliberately deprived of reliable information about the efficacy of AYUSH is denied a right upon which its own health and safety depend; and the state that creates that deprivation through the corruption of information available to its citizens has crossed into the territory the definition of state crime describes. Nanda calls the MoA’s conduct a two-step dance: claiming the authority of science when promoting a remedy, then claiming the tradition sits beyond science’s reach the moment that authority is challenged.[65]
The state crime theory looks towards civil society to understand state deviance. Civil society is the social audience that occupies the space between the state and the private sphere of life.[66] It comprises “associations independent of the state that articulate purportedly collective interests or universal principles”.[67] Civil society names the deviant behaviour (not necessarily using the vocabulary of law), it makes instances of such deviant behaviour publicly visible, and puts pressure on the perpetrators to cease their activities and/ or make amends.[68] In the context of public health, medical practitioners, researchers and their associations, right-to-information activists, journalists and the public themselves who have been consistently calling out the deviant actions of the state, critiquing its policies and applying pressure to cease or make amends through research publications, litigation and such other measures, form part of civil society.
Civil society in India has been repeatedly calling out this, as Nanda describes it, two-step dance, and the state’s response has not been to engage but to double down and deify AYUSH. The decision to permit Ayurveda practitioners to perform fifty-eight types of surgical treatments and the proposal to integrate clinical medicine with Ayurveda at an educational level show this expanding from claims about remedies into the practice of medicine itself. In a country with graded inequalities in the form of caste, class, gender and rural-urban divide, AYUSH is presented as an attractive, cost-effective, and at times the only option that is also rooted in the assumed goodness of “profound knowledge”. Marginalised bodies then are forced to absorb yet another form of institutional cruelty, even as ministers who advocate for AYUSH turn to clinical medicine when they fall ill.[69] The state has not merely copped out of its responsibility to build a robust public healthcare system; it has become an active player in creating and sustaining an environment of medical disinformation for the sake of an ideological agenda. A state crime lens helps make sense of this pattern for what it is – what looks like a series of policy blunders resulting from an attempt to improve public healthcare is better understood as organisational deviance, with consequences serious enough to warrant far closer research than this article offers.
[1] ‘Ayush’ also means ‘long life’ or ‘vitality’ in Sanskrit.
[2] Rishiraj Bhagawati, “In India’s ailing healthcare system, high costs are driving many to debt – and sometimes death” Scroll.in (26 September 2025) https://scroll.in/article/1086371/in-indias-ailing-healthcare-system-high-costs-are-driving-many-to-debt-and-sometimes-death accessed 03 July 2026.
[3] Ministry of Ayush, Government of India, ‘About Ministry’ https://ayush.gov.in/ accessed 30 June 2026.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ayush Clinical Case Repository, “About Us” (Ministry of Ayush) https://accr.ayush.gov.in/about_us accessed 07 October 2026.
[6] Ministry of Ayush (n 3).
[7] Venera Khalikova, “Medicine and the Cultural Politics of National Belongings in Contemporary India: Medical Plurality or Ayurvedic Hegemony?” (2018) 13 Asian Medicine 198 DOI:10.1163/15734218-12341413 accessed 17 July 2026; Saurav Kumar Rai, “Invoking “Hindu” Ayurveda: Communalisation of the Late Colonial Ayurvedic Discourse” (2019) 56(4) The Indian Economic and Social History Review 411 https://doi.org/10.1177/0019464619873820 accessed 17 July 2026.
[8] Ayurveda and Yoga are routinely constructed as the only authentically Indian homegrown forms of alternative medicine, their national belonging affirmed while that of other AYUSH systems is contested; Khalikova (n 7).
[9] Meera Nanda, “Bad Medicine, Fake History, Postcolonial Complicity: Ayurveda in the Time of COVID” The Wire Science (16 September 2021) https://science.thewire.in/society/history/bad-medicine-fake-history-postcolonial-complicity-ayush-ayurveda-covid-19/ accessed 03 July 2026.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Shardool Katyayan, “Cow urine research is just the tip of India’s science funding problem” The News Minute (02 July 2026) https://www.thenewsminute.com/news/cow-urine-research-is-just-the-tip-of-indias-science-funding-problem accessed 03 July 2026.
[12] Press Information Bureau, “Establishment of new Ayush Institutes and hospitals in the country” (Ministry of Ayush, 04 August 2026).
[13] Ministry of Ayush, “From Roots to Global Reach: 11 Years of Transformation in AYUSH (2014-2025)” (Government of India 2025) 18 https://ayush.gov.in/assets/pdf/11-Years-AYUSH-REPORT-2025.pdf accessed 03 July 2026.
[14] National Commission for Indian System of Medicine, “Introduction” (NCISM) http://ncismindia.org/introduction.php accessed 17 September 2026.
[15] National Commission for Homeopathy. “About Us” (NCH) https://nch.org.in/about-us accessed 17 September 2026.
[16] Ministry of Ayush (n 12).
[17] Ibid 68.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Ministry of Ayush (@moayush), “As per principles of Naturopathy…” X (14 November 2018) https://x.com/moayush/status/1062502641106792450 accessed 03 July 2026.
[20] A US patent obtained in 2002 during the previous BJP government; Suman Preet Singh Khanuja and others, Pharmaceutical Composition Containing Cow Urine Distillate and an Antibiotic (US Patent No. US6410059B1, 25 June 2026) https://patents.google.com/patent/US6410059B1/en accessed 04 July 2026.
[21] Pancha (five) gavya (from cow) is a concoction of five cow-derivatives: dung, urine, milk, curd and ghee (clarified butter); Press Information Bureau, Government of India, “Panchagavya therapy” (Ministry of Ayush, 27 February 2015). https://www.pib.gov.in/newsite/PrintRelease.aspx?relid=116073®=48&lang=2 accessed 04 July 2026.
[22] Neelam Pandey, “Cow urine, milk can treat skin diseases…” The Print (06 January 2021) https://theprint.in/india/cow-urine-milk-can-treat-skin-diseases-psoriasis-modi-govts-agency-in-document-for-exam/580225/ accessed 03 July 2026.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Liza Fazio, Nadio Brashier, Keith Payne and Elizabeth Marsh, “Knowledge does not protect against illusory truth” (2015) 144 (5) Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 993 https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/xge-0000098.pdf accessed 17 July 2026.
[25] Dr Sumaiya Shaikh, “An Eye Injury in Haryana…” AltNews (01 July 2017) https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5449825/ accessed 03 July 2026.
[26] Danish Siddique, “Hindu Group Offers Cow Urine in a Bid to Ward off Coronavirus” Reuters (14 March 2020) https://www.reuters.com/article/world/hindu-group-offers-cow-urine-in-a-bid-to-ward-off-coronavirus-idUSKBN2110D4/ accessed 04 July 2026.
[27] Press Information Bureau, Government of India, “Measures Taken by the Government to Curtail Misinformation via Non-AYUSH Researchers” (Ministry of Ayush, 16 July 2019 https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1578976®=48&lang=2 accessed 04 July 2026.
[28] Subhangi Mishra, “AYUSH Ministry Threatens Kerala Doctor with Defamation for “Denigrating” Ayurveda” The Print, (21 September 2021) https://theprint.in/health/ayush-ministry-threatens-kerala-doctor-with-defamation-for-denigrating-ayurveda/736863/ accessed 03 July 2026.
[29] Newslaundry, “Don’t call homeopaths quacks: AYUSH body flags insults, govt blocks Liver Doc’s post” https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/06/09/dont-call-homeopaths-quacks-ayush-body-flags-insults-govt-blocks-liver-docs-post accessed 03 July 2026.
[30] ET Online, “Form claiming a COVID cure to receiving an anonymous letter: The unfolding of the Patanjali case” The Economic Times (11 April 2024) https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/from-claiming-a-covid-cure-to-receiving-an-anonymous-letter-the-unfolding-of-the-patanjali-case/articleshow/109216803.cms?from=mdr accessed 17 July 2026.
[31] Rohin Kumar, “Why India’s doctors are furious over yoga guru Ramdev’s remarks” Al Jazeera (26 May 2021) https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/26/why-indias-doctors-are-furious-over-yoga-guru-ramdevs-remarks accessed 18 July 2026.
[32] Ritwik Choudhary, “Misleading medical ads case: Supreme Court closes case, allows AYUSH ads without State approval” Bar and Bench https://www.barandbench.com/news/misleading-medical-ads-case-supreme-court-closes-case-allows-ayush-ads-without-state-approval accessed 18 July 2026; Government of India, Ministry of Ayush, Lok Sabha, Unstarred Question No. 993, “Misleading Advertisements of AYUSH Products”, answered 25 July 2025, https://sansad.in/getFile/loksabhaquestions/annex/185/AU993_qpeaAf.pdf?source=pqals accessed 19 July 2026.
[33] Ministry of Ayush, “Government strengthens measures for consumer protection and curb unverified claims by Ayush product manufacturers” (Press Information Bureau, 25 July 2025) https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2148433®=48&lang=2 accessed 29 September 2026.
[34] Statements of the amicus curiae as noted in the order passed in Indian Medical Association v Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) No. 645 of 2022 (Supreme Court of India, 11 August 2025).
[35] The Wire Staff, “IMA Strike Against Ayurveda Students Performing Surgery May Affect Medical Services” (The Wire, 11 December 2020) https://thewire.in/health/ima-strike-ayurveda-surgery accessed 22 September 2026.
[36] Press Trust of India, “Medical Body Begins Hunger Strike Over Surgery Permission to Ayurveda Doctors” (NDTV, 01 February 2021) https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/medical-body-ima-begins-hunger-strike-over-surgery-permission-to-ayurveda-doctors-2361392 accessed 22 September 2026.
[37] Indian Medicine Central Council (Post Graduate Ayurveda Education) Amendment Regulations 2020.
[38] The Wire Staff (n 34).
[39] Indian Medical Association, “IMA to NMC” (IMA News, 25 November 2020) 162 https://www.ima-india.org/ima/pdfdata/12-Dec-2020-IMA-NEWS.pdf accessed 25 September 2026.
[40] Ministry of Ayush, “Clarifications with respect to respect to the Indian Medicine Central Council (Post Graduate Ayurveda Education) Amendment Regulations, 2020 (Press Information Bureau, 22 November 2020) https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1674881®=48&lang=2 accessed 23 September 2026.
[41] Ibid.
[42] National Medical Commission, “Introduction” (NMC) https://nmc.org.in/page/about-nmc-introduction accessed 28 September 2026.
[43] Indian Medical Association (n 39) 165.
[44] Press Trust of India, “To plea on surgeries by Ayurveda doctors, Top Court asks Centre to reply” (NDTV, 15 March 2021) https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/to-plea-on-surgeries-by-ayurveda-doctors-supreme-court-asks-centre-to-reply-2391130 accessed 22 September 2026.
[45] Awstika Das, “Right to Life in Jeopardy Because Of AYUSH ‘Doctors’ Practising Modern Medicine: SC Issues Notice On Plea By Association Of Medical Consultants” (LiveLaw, 20 September 2020) https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/supreme-court-ayush-allopathy-integration-association-of-medical-consultants-plea-209755 accessed 29 September 2026.
[46] Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and most recently, Andhra Pradesh.
[47] Indian Medical Association, “Mixology” IMA News (August 2025) 16, https://www.ima-india.org/ima/pdfdata/News2025/IMA-News-August-2025.pdf accessed 22 September 2026.
[48] Kavita Bajeli-Dutt, “Govt backs integrated medical course approved by Auroville at JIPMER without consulting regulatory bodies: RTIs” The New Indian Express (31 July 2025) https://www.newindianexpress.com/states/tamil-nadu/2025/Jul/31/govt-backs-integrated-medical-course-proposed-by-auroville-at-jipmer-without-consulting-regulatory-bodies-rtis accessed 29 September 2026.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Press Information Bureau, “JIPMER denies reports of proposed MBBS and BAMS dual degree programme” https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2166410®=48&lang=2 (13 September 2025) accessed 29 September 2026.
[51] Kavita Bajeli-Dutt, “JIPMER not yet shelved dual course on med degree, forms internal panel” The New Indian Express (19 September 2025). https://www.newindianexpress.com/india/2025/Sep/19/jipmer-not-yet-shelved-dual-course-on-med-degree-forms-internal-panel accessed 29 September 2026.
[52] Nanda (n 9).
[53] Ibid.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Ibid.
[58] The Wire, “Patanjali, Ayush Ministry and the Ecosystem of Pseudoscience” (YouTube, 24 February 2021) 00:00 to 01:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG1uExnuKAw&t=29s accessed 18 July 2026.
[59] Ibid.
[60] Ibid.
[61] Ibid.
[62] Jaydeep Mukherjee, “Patanjali Ayurveda’s Coronil: Marketing Controversy on COVID-19 Cure” (2024) 28 (1) Vision 120 https://doi.org/10.1177/09722629211004003 accessed 18 July 2026.
[63] The Quint, “Haryana Government to Give Ramdev’s Coronil Free to COVID Patients” (25 May 2021) https://www.thequint.com/news/india/haryana-government-anil-vij-coronil-baba-ramdev-free-covid-patients#read-more accessed 18 July 2026.
[64] Penny Green and Tony Ward, “State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption” (Pluto Press, 2004) 2.
[65] Nanda (n 9).
[66] Green and Ward (n 64) 4.
[67] Green and Ward (n 64) 22.
[68] Penny Green and Tony Ward, “State Crime and Civil Activism” (Routledge, 2019) 12-13.
[69] HT Correspondent, “AIIMS Doctors to Fly Down to Monitor Union Minster Shripad Naik’s COVID Treatment” Hindustan Times (17 August 2020) https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/aiims-doctors-to-fly-down-to-monitor-union-minister-shripad-naik-s-covid-treatment/story-ZTJZ2Nksa3DcVsP00yP9UL.html accessed 04 July 2026.