RSS prescribing fair, tall ‘customised’ babies is dystopia in the womb
A report in the Indian Express of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) working on a decade-old project to “customise” newborns and ensure they are “tall, fair” etc, has supposedly taken the country by storm.
The report says that the Garbh Vigyan Sanskar project of the RSS’ health wing Arogya Bharati has been associated with an “ambitious programme” with nods from top RSS office-bearers to help Indian women deliver what they have termed the “uttam santati” – the perfect, “customised child”.
Revolting as this might sound, there is absolutely nothing shocking in these revelations, which have been hardly covert, and have been operational in BJP-ruled states like Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh for over 10 years.
So the news of the Garbh Vigyan Sanskar – loosely translated into Disciplining Pregnancy Science – has only come to light now because the RSS intends to take this pseudoscientific project to the non-traditional territories that the Sangh is now eyeing for political capture; in particular, Kolkata.
The report provides an interesting insight into the congenitally martial and race-imbued character of the RSS and its distorted worldview.
The prescription, among other advices, includes: “Three months of shuddhikaran (purification) for parents, intercourse at a time decided by planetary configurations, complete abstinence after the baby is conceived, and procedural and dietary regulations.”
Search for martial ‘purity’
Not only is this racially and communally motivated urge to “purify” common to the previously undertaken projects such as “ghar wapsi” and “love jihad”, it is now targeting the unborn and future children of India and is aiming to reshape the younger generation in its skewed, racist, religious supremacist image.
The report quotes Dr Karishma Mohandas Narwani, the national convener of the Garbh Vigyan Sanskar project, as saying, “Our main objective is to make a Samarth Bharat (strong India) through uttam santati. Our target is to have thousands of such babies by 2020.”
Just like its absurd veneration of the cow and recreating Indian national politics around cow symbolism taken to unprecedented and frankly murderous levels, the current project unveils the larger scheme in which the RSS blueprint for a racially exclusionist India is laid out for everyone to see.
The twinning of “garbh vigyan” – pregnancy science, with “sanskar” – disciplining of values through tradition, is telling, because it once again sheds light on how the RSS intends to fuse what it considers the traits of a civilisationally North Indian cow-belt Hindu India, with the technofascist, pseudoscientific hogwash of creating a physically and mentally superior class of people by targeting the womb.
As India now has a ministry of AYUSH, which legitimises non-Western medicinal and physiological disciplines such as Ayurveda, Unani, homeopathy, naturopathy, etc, staggering amount of official investment is being poured into parascientific branches that have questionable validity, despite the claims to decolonise science and medicine from Anglo-European clutches.
The official emphasis on “panchagavya” – made of cow dung and other bovine ingredients best reserved for excellent manure – as a panacea for all medical ills mirrors the similar official madness over biometrics-based identification, as well as the now hardly hidden urge to create a superior race by disciplining the Hindu/Indian womb.
Straight out of Nazi playbook
Further, the office-bearers add that the project is about taking a leaf out of post-Second World War Germany, a resurrection if you will, of the super race of Aryans, which Adolf Hitler was hell bent on creating by mixing ghost works of laboratory eugenics and unleashing the Holocaust on six million Jews, millions of Gypsies, the Romas, communists, homosexuals, dissidents, physically handicapped and differently abled people.
This is the unfinished work of post-war Nazi Germany, the continuation of the Third Reich if you will, through a demented extension of its discredited and disavowed projects in 21st century India under the RSS’ thumb.
Disturbing doesn’t even begin to explain what’s at stake in what seems to be only the beginning of a long-drawn plan to reshape India into a Hindu Rashtra, a martial race of perfectly bodied army of religious bigotry and mindless war.
Even though RSS members like BJP MP in Rajya Sabha Tarun Vijay have betrayed similar sentiments in the past causing a major controversy, the fact remains that racist inclinations – the urge to create a race of super Hindus as citizens of an Akhand Bharat – has been at the core of the Sangh Parivar ideology. The writings of Veer Savarkar and MS Golwalkar are anything but invocations to build India along the Nazi lines.
The Nazi ideal, “Ubermenschen”, or the master Aryan race created through eugenics war driven and funded by the Hitler regime, in which creation of the stronger race corresponded directly with the extermination of what was considered as the inferior races and peoples.
Hundreds of thousands were made to undergo forced sterilisation during Third Reich, thousands were killed under Action T4, a laboratory euthanasia programme, while the concentration camps in Auschwitz and other places turned murder into an industrial achievement.
The basic lesson learnt from the horrors of the Nazi regime was that the creation of a human ideal through utterly misguided notions of genetic, racial and religious superiority was morally and ethically reprehensible.
The principle of secularism is one of the central tenets of post-war world order, at least on paper, and universal declaration of human rights in 1948 meant that everyone, regardless of race, colour, religion, sex, country of birth and sexual orientation, would be entitled to the same set of human values, rights and liberties without discrimination.
Attempting to recreate the Nazi world order, albeit in a Hindu light, reeks of similar prejudices and moral corrosion that led to the catastrophes of the First and the Second World War. That Germany itself is deeply apologetic of its horrid past and has done everything to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten so as it is never repeated anytime in the future hasn’t stopped those who feel inspired by one of the gravest and most inhuman chapters of civilisational history.
Chip in Sangh’s shoulders
Although the RSS had next to nothing participation in the Indian freedom struggle, and even though it had decided to support the British and pick Muslims, Christians and the seculars as the true enemy of India, the sting of being a “weak Hindu”, a physically inferior collection of people has never stopped hurting the Sangh.
Inspired by Swami Vivekananda’s calls for martial glory to be found in a recreated industrial Hinduism, the original RSS stalwarts found a political validity in racial resurrection championed by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich.
The Indian National Congress and its internationally oriented, pragmatically secular leadership, interested in maintaining the plural and multicultural fabric of India, therefore, was the bigger problem for the RSS, than the British themselves.
And even now, a racially pure search for homeland or creation of one along racially/communally pure lines appeals to the RSS and is at the heart of its ideology, and that is what explains the political admiration that many in the Sangh have for Zionist Israel, even though Jews were the main targets of the Nazi regime.
What had been relegated as extreme dystopia after the Second World War, as the worst nightmare ever that the world has dreamt and suffered together, is now gaining ultimate traction from the rightwing the world over.
India under RSS is one of the primary engines of that dystopian world order, which would decimate almost anything that would stand in its way to recreate the world in its terrifying image.
This is a nightmare that history has already warned us against.