Bhopal: Days after BJP leader Anurag Thakur suggested that Lord Hanuman could be considered the world’s first space traveller, his party colleague and former Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has said that India had flying machines centuries before the Wright brothers invented the aeroplane.

Speaking at the Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER) in Bhopal, Mr Chouhan referred to the Pushpaka Vimana mentioned in Hindu epics. “We had the Pushpak Viman long before the Wright brothers. Drones and missiles that we have today have already with us for thousands of years. We have read all this in the Mahabharata. Our country’s science and technology were already developed thousands of years ago,” he claimed.

Modern history, however, credits the Wright brothers — Orville and Wilbur — with achieving the world’s first powered flight in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Their motorised aircraft laid the foundation for modern aviation.

Mr Chouhan’s comments add to a series of recent statements by Indian political leaders linking mythological accounts with scientific achievements. Earlier this week, former Union Minister Anurag Thakur, while addressing students in Himachal Pradesh on National Space Day, asked who the first space traveller was. When some replied “Neil Armstrong,” Mr. Thakur said he believed it was Lord Hanuman.

The first human in space was Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who on April 12, 1961, orbited the Earth aboard Vostok 1. Neil Armstrong, by contrast, was the first human to walk on the Moon during NASA’s Apollo 11 mission in 1969.