Regressive racial purity

The Bombay Parsi Punchayet’s (BPP) Lebensborn project has met with disaster. The Daily News and Analysis (DNA) newspaper, carried an article on August 21, 2011, titled "High priests of Parsi pride and prejudice,” informing readers that the BPP’s selective breeding program is a debacle. Not content with burning its fingers by overstepping its jurisdiction and dabbling in religious matters, the BPP took to eugenics in the hope of creating a genetically superior "Parsi-Irani” race, and in order to prevent the pristine "Parsi-Irani” gene pool from being contaminated.

Are young Zoroastrian adults akin to racehorses, pedigree dogs and farm animals that they are to be herded to social gatherings, fed sandwiches and aerated water, made to sing Bollywood songs, and then asked to mate? It is sheer arrogance on the part of the trustees of the BPP that they dare to step into people’s personal lives. Now we even have the Punchayet in our bedrooms! It is an invasion of our privacy, and a transgression of our right to choose our life partner. Innumerable articles in medical journals have cautioned about the dangers of endogamous and consanguineous unions which impair the immune system. In Haryana, the primitive Khaps have for ages banned unions within the community, and have even proscribed couples who marry within the community. Even among animals, males are expelled from the pride or herd when they attain maturity, in order to prevent inbreeding.

"Lebensborn” translates to "fountain or life.” The Lebensborn project was one of the most secret and terrifying projects of the Nazis. Heinrich Himmler founded the project on December 12, 1935, the same year that the Nuremberg Laws outlawed intermarriage with Jews and others who were deemed inferior. Himmler encouraged SS (Schutzstaffel) and Wermacht officers to have children with Aryan women. The purpose of this project was to offer to young girls who were deemed "racially pure” the possibility to give birth to a child in secret. Both mother and father needed to pass a "racial purity” test. Blond hair and blue eyes were preferred, and family lineage had to be traced back at least three generations. One of the most horrible sides of the Lebensborn policy was the kidnapping of "racially good” children in the eastern occupied countries after 1939. These kidnappings were organized by the SS in order to take by force children who matched the Nazis’ racial criteria (blond hair and blue or green eyes). Nonetheless, research on the offspring of the experiment concluded that, as is now known, IQ (intelligence quotient) regressed toward the population mean and the IQs of the offspring were generally lower than that of their parents.

The Zoroastrian community of India should remain vigilant and condemn such regressive, feudal, parochial and extremely dangerous practices of the BPP. The trustees of the Punchayet have been elected only to manage the funds and properties of the trust, not to play matchmaker. It is lack of higher education and the unwillingness to compete which are the bane of the community, not the unwillingness to get married.

BARAK AGA

barak.aga@hotmail.com