by Shamsul Islam
According to press reports, one of the RSS offshoots, Garbh Vigyan Sanskar (Uterus Science Culture), following the Vedic preaching and post-World War II experiments in Germany, is conducting live trials in many parts of India for producing ‘fair' and ‘tall' ‘customised' babies. According to Dr Hitesh Jani, convenor of the Arogya Bharati, another outfit of the RSS which is part of the project,
“If the proper procedure is followed, babies of dark-skinned parents with lesser height can have fair complexion and grow taller.”
Speaking to a prominent English daily of India, top office-bearers associated with this “top-priority” project of the RSS, shared the facts that
“it was launched in Gujarat over a decade ago, and taken up at the national level in 2015. Today, the project, assisted by the Sangh's education wing, Vidya Bharati, has around 10 branches in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, with more units to come up soon in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal”.
According to Dr Karishma Mohandas Narwani, national convener of the project,“Our main objective is to make a samarth Bharat (capable India) through uttam santati (best off- springs). Our target is to have thousands of such babies by 2020.”
1[The Sunday Express, May 7, 2017, Delhi, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/rss-wing-has-prescription-for-fair-tall-customised-babies-4644280/&http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/editorials/ayurvedic-eugenics-rss-health-wing-ideal-babies-4646657/]
According to the managers of this venture, this project was inspired on the advice of a senior RSS ideologue, received over 40 years ago, who found Germany had
“resurrected itself by having such signature children through Ayurvedic practices within two decades after World War II”.
Dr Ashok Kumar Varshney, an RSS pracharak for over 30 years and national organising secretary of the Arogya Bharati, said that apart from a university in Jamnagar, two other institutions have incorporated Garbh Vigyan Sanskar in their curriculum: the Children University in Gandhinagar and Atal Behari Vajpayee Hindi University in Bhopal.
The project claims to have ensured the delivery of 450 “customised babies” so far, and its target is to have a Garbh Vigyan Anusan-dhan Kendra, a facilitation centre, in every State by 2020.The aim of this project is that women should deliver an “uttam santati”; a perfect, “customised child”. The process requires 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. In order to spread the goal of producing ‘tall' and ‘fair' babies, several seminars and counselling sessions have been held in Delhi, Mumbai, and smaller cities such as Udupi in Karnataka, Kasaragod in Kerala, and Visakhapatnam and Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh.
The next counselling sessions are scheduled to be held in Kolkata, Rohtak and Gurgaon. The RSS is hopeful that by 2020 to have thousands of ideal infants on the production line.
This RSS' love for ‘fair' and ‘tall' babies and subsequent hatred for ‘dark-skinned' people is being proclaimed soon after another RSS ideologue, Tarun Vijay, made a startling announcement. Tarun Vijay, the former editor of the RSS' Hindi organ, Panchajanya, in-charge of the RSS project of spreading Hindutva politics in Tamil Nadu, an ex-member of the Rajya Sabha who also heads the India-Africa Parlia-mentary Friendship Group, while talking to a global news network, had stated that white Indians from the North of the country were living with “black people around us” who inhabited in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra. Tarun's statement re-emphasised the racist understanding of the RSS about India; North Indians are White (Aryans) whereas South Indians are Black (Dravidians) thus belonging to two different races. The Aryans of the North are doing a favour to Black South Indians by allowing the latter to stay with the former.2 [http://indianexpress.com/article/blogs/tarun-vijays-take-that-people-ofsouth-india-are-black-is-not-surprising/]
This RSS love for a race which is of “fair” complexion is part of its ideological heritage that Indians are Aryans; fair, tall, honourable, respectable and noble who speak Sanskrit. The RSS stands for Aryan supremacy and believes that only Hindu Brahmins of North India are from that stock. The most prominent ideologue of the RSS and second supremo, Guru Golwalkar, while addressing a gathering of faculty and students of the School of Social Science of Gujarat University on December 17, 1960, shared the wisdom that Namboodri Brahmins from North India were sent to Kerala to improve the breed of Hindus there. According to him,
“Today experiments in cross-breeding are made only on animals. But the courage to make such experiments on human beings is not shown even by the so-called modern scientists of today. If some human crossbreeding is seen today it is the result not of scientific experiments but of carnal lust. Now let us see the experiments our ancestors made in this sphere. In an effort to better the human species through cross-breeding the Namboodri Brahamanas [sic] of the North were settled in Kerala and a rule was laid down that the eldest son of a Namboodri family could marry only the daughter of Vaishya, Kshatriya or Shudra communities of Kerala. Another still more courageous rule was that the first off-spring of a married woman of any class must be fathered by a Namboodri Brahman and then she could beget children by her husband.”3 [Cited in the English organ of the RSS, Organiser, January 2, 1961]
The above statement of Golwalkar, once again as a hardened racist, stressed the belief that India had a superior race or breed and also an inferior race which needed to be improved through crossbreeding. Namboodri Brahmans, belonging to a superior race, were sent from the North to Kerala to improve the breed of inferior Hindus there.
The RSS' belief of Aryan superiority has been borrowed from Hitler and his Nazi Party of Germany. Adolf Hitler, even before becoming the Chancellor of Germany, was obsessed with ideas about race. He believed in racial “purity” and in the superiority of the “Germanic race” which he described as Aryan “master race”. He declared that this Aryan race must remain pure in order to rule the world one day which was not far away. According to Hitler, the ideal “Aryan” was blond, blue-eyed, and tall.
When Hitler and the Nazis came to power, these beliefs became the government ideology and were spread in publicly displayed posters, on the radio, in movies, in classrooms, and in newspapers. The Nazis began to put their ideology into practice with the support of German scientists who believed that the human race could be improved by limiting the repro-duction of people considered “inferior”. Beginning in 1933, German physicians were allowed to perform forced sterilisations, operations making it impossible for the victims to have children. Among the targets of this public programme were Roma (Gypsies), an ethnic minority numbering about 30,000 in Germany, and handicapped individuals, including the mentally ill and people born deaf and blind. Also victimised were about 500 African-German children, the offspring of German mothers and African colonial soldiers in the Allied armies that occupied the German Rhineland region after World War I.4 https://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007679
In fact, the present project of the RSS aimed at producing ‘fair' and ‘tall' ‘customised' babies is a direct borrowing from the Nazis' “Lebens-born” (“Spring of Life”) programme to create an Aryan master race. Under this project of breeding of children of pure Aryan race, some 8000 children were born in Germany and around 12,000 in Norway as part of “Lebensborn” under the direct supervision Nazi theoretician and leader, Heinrich Himmler, to encourage women of “pure blood” to bear fair-tall Aryan children. Interestingly, most of such bred children did not grow into fair-tall and blond babies. However, it was an integral part of a murderous racial policy that on the one hand aimed at producing pure Aryan children and on the other hand exterminated non-Aryans like Jews, six million of them killed and the forced sterilisation of people with hereditary diseases.5
The RSS project of “uttam santati”, a white and tall “customised child” in its first gear, attempts to follow the Nazi racist project, ”Lebensborn”. As a natural corollary, soon it will go for the second part of the project like Nazis: eliminating all those Indians who are not found to be “Aryan” of pure blood. It is to be noted that the Hindutva gang historically has been a worshipper of Nazi ideals. The most prominent ideologue of the RSS even penned a highly despicable book, We, Or Our Nationhood Defined, in 1939. In this book, Golwalkar not only glorified cleansing of millions of Jews by Hitler but also advised the Hindutva organisations in India to emulate the Nazis in exterminating Muslims and Christians who were not “Aryans”.6 However, these will not only be Muslims and Christians who will face the lynching mobs but also most of the South Indians who have been already declared as “Black”.
Endnotes
1. The Sunday Express, May 7, 2017, Delhi, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/rss-wing-has-prescription-for-fair-tall-customised-babies-4644280/&
3. Cited in the English organ of the RSS, Organiser, January 2, 1961.
4. https://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId= 10007679
6. See, Islam, Shamsul, Golwalkar's We Or Our Nationhood Defined: A Critique With Full Text of the Book, Pharos Media, Delhi, 2nd edition, 2011.
Shamsul Islam, a well-known theatre personality, is a former Associate Professor (now retired), Department of Political Science, Satyawati College, University of Delhi. For some of the author's writings in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Punjabi, Urdu and Gujarati see the following link: http/du-in.academia.edu/Shamsullslam