Who doesn't want the perfect child - intelligent, beautiful, in the pink of health and well behaved. Well, Karishma Mohandas Narwani, an ayurvedic doctor who runs Ved Garbha, a "well-equipped modernised garbh sanskar-ayurvedic antenatal care" clinic at Jamnagar in Gujarat, claims to have cracked the equation to produce uttam santati (perfect progeny).
There was a huge brouhaha recently over efforts to revive a supposedly ancient Indian method of garbh sanskar (educating the mind of the foetus) to ensure the "best babies in the world". The method, championed by the Garbh Vigyan Sanskar project of Arogya Bharati - an organisation aligned to the RSS - was lampooned; some even branded it racist quackery inspired by and imitating Nazi Germany.
I'd rather borrow a German phrase attributed to theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli: The method is not only not right; it is not even wrong ( Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch!). Pauli, known for his colourful objections to incorrect or sloppy thinking, made this remark about a shoddy piece of research by a young scientist. Ever since, the phrase has been used to describe pseudoscience or bad science.
Narwani, national convener of the garbh sanskar project, told The Telegraph she's been working on her programme for "Vedic motherhood" for 14 years and her module is rooted in ayurveda. She recently conducted an awareness campaign in Calcutta for Arogya Bharati, which has plans to spread the programme across the country. The workshop at Ekal Bhawan in Bhowanipore was a closely guarded affair; a child rights activist who is also a gynaecologist was denied entry.
Narwani advises 20-30 couples every month. "We want to build a strong India by creating perfect children using ancient ayurvedic garbh sanskar techniques," Narwani said, echoing the Ved Garbha website: "Our aim is to deliver genius, well cultured, righteous, magnificent, healthy and beautiful child." Arogya Bharati got involved with her programme two and half years ago since it was in sync with the RSS-affiliate's motto.
According to Ved Garbha there are "four features responsible for procreation and any fault in any of these will result in improper reproduction or the product of such will have one or other problems". These four features are: ritu (the ideal season, age of the couple or time of copulation), kshetra (the site or place), beeja (the seed and the reproductive organs, its patterns) and ambu (nutrition for the foetus).
Ved Garbha's total package includes diet, care of the expectant mother, body cleansing measures and an exercise routine - complete with the specific time to attempt conception as per cosmic energy - besides delivery through "allopathic techniques" (sic).
Some scientists compare this programme with the Lebensborn Project, a breeding programme in Hitler's Germany - conceived by Heinrich Himmler, the psychopathic head of the German SS - to create a blond and blue-eyed "pure" Aryan race. "Perfect" women, usually impregnated by SS men, gave birth secretly in clinics called Lebensborn, or fountain of life. Obsessed with his experiments to breed "pure white" chickens while running a poultry farm before World War II, Himmler was intent on doing the same with humans.
This garbh sanskar sounds like some kind of a breeding project on those [Himmler's] lines adopted in farms and poultries for ages," says Abhijit Chakrabarti, a senior professor at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics. "I have no problems as long as no one claims this is a scientific project," he adds.
However, Garbh Vigyan Anusandhan Kendra, an institution doing research work on Ayurvedic antenatal care in Jamnagar, claims that its programme is based on the advice of ancient Indian seers. The project claims to be able to repair genes to prevent defects from being passed on, and claims to have produced 450 perfect babies so far.
"I think these people don't even have the basic knowledge of genetics proposed by Gregor Mendel in the 19th century," says a furious Chakrabarti. For thousands of years farmers and herders have been selectively breeding their plants and animals. It was a hit or miss process, since the actual mechanisms governing inheritance were unknown. It was the Austrian monk who first explained these underlying genetic mechanisms scientifically and is the founder of modern genetics.
"Since these garbh sanskaris are claiming their procedure is scientific, let them document the details and publish it in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Also, they must lay down a specific scientific guideline that is reproducible; that means anyone should be able to retrace the procedure," says Chakrabarti. "These are basics of a scientific procedure."
It's clear that these people are oblivious of just how much science has progressed. Genetics, especially, has taken giant leaps in the last two decades after the Human Genome Project. Says Amitabha Sengupta, a geneticist at Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Calcutta, "Now we have got CRISPR-Cas9, a unique technology that enables us to edit parts of the genome. It's a versatile and precise method of genetic manipulation." According to him, the methods these people are trying to sell are extremely regressive. "They are pushing the country backwards and turning Indians into a laughing stock in the global arena of science," he rues.
In the eyes of science, the garbh sanskaris are wronger than wrong; you don't need to be a gynaecologist to prove that.
