Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said that he was a big Ganesha devotee but added that the elephant-headed God was a belief and not the result of plastic surgery. 

"Everyone knows it is impossible to place an elephant head on a human neck. We worship Lord Ganesha with great fervour but we don't have to take the belief in a literal sense," Tharoor told Manorama News on Thursday. The Congress MP was responding to questions on the 'Ganesha myth' controversy triggered by Speaker A N Shamseer's words.

Nonetheless, Tharoor said that plastic surgery had indeed originated in India. "Susrutha was the world's first plastic surgeon. We have discovered the documentation of the entire process of a rhinoplasty (plastic surgery on the nose) done some 2000 years ago. We have also come across the surgical instruments used during that period. Therefore, no one is in doubt that Susrutha and India had pioneered plastic surgery," Tharoor said.

Long before Shamseer spoke of the ruling party's tendency to reposition myths as scientific truths, Tharoor had publicly argued against it. In fact Tharoor had criticised the very same comments of Prime Minister Narendra Modi that Shamseer had also found appalling.

This was why the CPM state secretary M V Govindan, while declaring that the Speaker will not apologise for his remarks, had said that Shamseer had not said anything different from what Tharoor had once said. 

In an article he wrote for Project Syndicate in 2018, Tharoor had said that Prime Minister Modi had joined the assault on science. Like Shamseer, Tharoor too had referred to Modi's speech at the inauguration of a corporate hospital in Mumbai in 2014. 

"Modi likes to be portrayed as a technologically savvy twenty-first-century leader. But, at the inauguration of a Mumbai hospital in October 2014, he claimed that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesh was proof of ancient India’s knowledge of plastic surgery. The ancient epic the Mahabharata, he then declared, confirmed that, “people then were aware of genetic science.” It apparently didn’t occur to Modi that the smallest elephant head could not possibly fit the largest human neck," he wrote. 

On Thursday, Tharoor told Manorma News that he had publicly stated that there was no need for the Prime Minister to connect a scientific truth with one of our religious beliefs. "This is wrong. I said his words had actually undermined our past achievements," he said.

Here is what Tharoor said in his article. "Subsuming these historical facts in a narrative about mythological transplanted elephant heads did science – and the people whose achievements deserve to be honored – a serious disservice."

However, on the Shamseer issue, Tharoor said that he did not see why a non-believer should comment on religious beliefs. "I have no right to speak about the beliefs of others. Beliefs should always be respected. There should be no attempt to hurt the faithful," he said.