'Super Baby'? RSS Workshop In Kolkata Has 'Ancient' Advice For Parents-To-Be

Kolkata: Arogya Bharati's garbh sanskar or womb purification workshop in Kolkata got off to a chaotic start on Sunday. Activists insisted on attending the lecture permitted by the Calcutta High Court, but Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS workers refused to let them in - not even the head of West Bengal's Commission for Protection of Child Rights which had filed a PIL, saying garbh sanskar was unscientific and regressive. Sixty couples had signed up, many came, some for them were attending such a session for the second time in Kolkata. 

"I am the chairperson of the Commission for the Protection of Child Rights... I have the Constitutional right to enter here. You cannot stop me," said Ananya Chakraborty, the chairperson as she was hustled out by several people from Ekal Bhavan where Arogya Bharati has an office. The workshop was been held in a hall at the building. 

But the organisation's lawyer, Swapan Das, said, "Show me a court order. I don't know what international chairperson you are but without a court order, you are not going in."

That was just one of many angry outbursts outside the venue on Harish Mukherjee Road where the medical wing of the RSS held a lecture on garbh sanskar - the cleansing the womb to get a 'susantan'.

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Why the secrecy, Mr Das was asked by media who were also not allowed in. "Nothing at all," he said. No designer babies? he was asked. "Only ancient Indian advice to would be parents. No designer babies, no special babies, no genius babies, no super babies. There is no scope of that in India," he added. 

Ms Chakraborty went to the nearby Bhawanipore police station to file a complaint against Arogya Bharati. "The matter was so hush hush, why?" she asked. "We had to file the PIL. This hocus pocus and nonsense cannot be allowed to continue."

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Meanwhile, couples streamed in. Mr and Mrs Akhilesh Mishra, in their 20s, had been to a similar meet three four months ago in Kolkata. They remembered a video they were shown.

"They had showed us a presentation that time. When the baby is in stomach, if you play pop music and if you play soft music, the baby's face is different in the ECG," Mr Mishra said. "When you play soft music, there is a smile. When you play pop music, it looks disturbed."

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"Complete ignorance, complete lack of scientific thought. It is painful for us to come to terms with this," said Urmi Basu, an activist with New Light that works with disadvantaged children, who had come to Ekal Bhavan to protest. 

The Calcutta High Court will examine the complete video recording of the weekend lecture by one Karishma Navrani, a visiting lecturer at the Gujarat Ayurved University at Jamnagar.