'First space traveller was Hanuman ji': ex-Indian minister's claim startles school event; memes and backlash follow

Anurag Thakur, former union minister in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at the centre has gone viral for his statement on Lord Hanuman during an interaction with school children on National Space Day on Saturday (Aug 23). In the clip, the five-time parliamentarian is heard saying Lord Hanuman was the "first to travel in space."

During his interaction with students at Shri Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalaya in Una, Himachal Pradesh, Thakur asked, “who was the first person to travel to space.” In reply the students said “Neil Armstrong,” but Thakur responded by saying “I think Hanuman ji was the first person to travel to space.”

While making the comments, Thakur urged teachers to look beyond “textbooks given to us by the British". He asked them to look towards “our vedas, our textbooks and our knowledge,” so that students get to learn more.

Thakur's comment invited criticism from the opposition who called it "deeply disturbing". DMK party MP Kanimozhi said, “A member of parliament and former union minister asking school children who first set foot on the moon, and insisting that it was not Neil Armstrong but Hanuman, is deeply troubling. Science is not mythology. To mislead young minds in classrooms is an insult to knowledge, reason, and the spirit of scientific temper enshrined in our Constitution.

Social media too was filled with reactions on Thakur's comments.

One of the user after watching the video on X wrote, “Instead of correcting the children, you told them Hanuman was the first space traveller with that frivolous smile. It was Yuri Gagarin. Stop playing with the innocent minds of children.”

A second user wrote, “Intellectualism shouldn’t be sacrificed for blind faith. Hanuman ate the Sun 15 million °C hot & 1.3M times bigger than Earth? That’s not science, it’s mythology. Does Anurag Thakur want kids to defy gravity too? Or just turn into zombies?”.

While a third wrote, “For the record: Yuri Gagarin (1961) was the first man in space, Valentina Tereshkova (1963) the first woman, Rakesh Sharma (1984) India’s first, and Kalpana Chawla the first Indian-born woman astronaut.”