Anurag Thakur shared a video of the interaction on X with the caption: “Pawansut Hanuman Ji… the first astronaut.” BJP leader and former union minister Anurag Thakur on Saturday told students at an event in Himachal Pradesh that Lord Hanuman could be considered the “first one to travel in space”, and asked them to look beyond textbooks to connect with India’s traditions.
The Hamirpur MP made the remarks while addressing students at a PM Shri School in Una on the occasion of National Space Day. Thakur later shared a video of the interaction on X with the caption: “Pawansut Hanuman Ji… the first astronaut.” During the session, Thakur asked the students, “Antriksh main yatra karne wala pehla kaun tha? (Who was the first space traveller?).” The students’ responses were not individually audible. Waiting with a smile, Thakur gave his own reply: “Mujhe toh lagta hai Hanuman ji the (I think it was Lord Hanuman).”
The five-time parliamentarian elaborated: “We still see ourselves in the now. As long as we do not know our thousands of years’ old tradition, knowledge, culture, we will remain the same as the British have shown us.” He added, “So, I would like to request the principal and all of you to think out of the textbooks and take a look at our nation, our traditions, our knowledge.”
“If you look at it from that direction, you will find a lot of things to see,” the former minister for information & broadcasting explained. Thakur’s remarks come at a time when India is witnessing renewed milestones in space exploration. Earlier this year, Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla became the second Indian astronaut to travel to space, four decades after Rakesh Sharma’s historic flight in 1984. Yuri Gagarin of Soviet Russia was the first man on a crewed spaceflight in 1961. He orbited the Earth once in a spacecraft in the historic 108-minute flight.
