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CHRISTMAS brings good cheer and revelry and rekindles our innate warmth towards each other. It is also a doleful season for the unloved. Christmas blues is a syndrome with characteristics of depression. Suicide rates spike in forlorn crevices of Europe and the victims are the lonely folks, overlooked or ignored in the hullaballoo.
Extremists of a different hue have taken over from the erstwhile IRA, which was an early exponent of using Christmas as an occasion to terrorise people by ambushing festive crowds. Muslim misfits may harbour the more virulent anti-bodies for Christians but, in India, a Hindutva-inspired state seems determined to undermine the community. Christmas Day has been spitefully renamed ‘good governance day’. Religious extremists in Pakistan and Bangladesh can congratulate their Hindutva cousins for keeping the minority Christians terrified. In Pakistan they routinely invoke the law to charge Christians with blasphemy, which became a capital crime under Ziaul Haq.
Christmas ushers mixed memories to a differently wired world of idealists and partisans. The Soviet Union imploded on Boxing Day in 1991, which is a day after Christmas, usually observed in Commonwealth countries as a day of exchanging gift boxes, hence the name. The plight of the Soviet cosmonauts is well chronicled; they left the USSR from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for their space mission before Christmas and returned after Boxing Day to find their country gone.
We generally notice our first white hair or a wrinkle one fine morning in the mirror. Most of us rarely experience the change happening every moment through a complex cellular motion. The same is true of political analysts. People may be competent at describing or disputing the elephant in the room but they are not always alert at figuring out the steady gait of the beast as it heads to its denouement.
In India, a Hindutva-inspired state seems determined to undermine the Christian community.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was nigh when it was trapped in Afghanistan. It was happening also when it invaded Hungary 35 years before the endgame. Chroniclers of the journey have included communist and anti-communist analysts alike. Warnings would come in novels scripted by disillusioned partisans. Some would speak through the popular arts, including cinema and theatre. Ziaul Hasan and Nikhil Chakravarty among Indian journalists and Faiz and Mazhar Ali Khan across the border, in Pakistan, were partisan journalists who saw early signs of trouble.
The Soviet Union waded into a fatal fall in Afghanistan around Christmas time in 1980. However, even in 1979, there was evidence that trouble was brewing for the larger communist world long before the Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul. A telling story of the mayhem among the comrades came in religious satire well before the Afghan fiasco. Monty Python’s Life of Brian starts with the birth of Jesus in a barn. The rip-roaring blend of political farce and religious satire offered what in my view could pass for insights into what was rotting within the partisan ranks in India.
The story begins when baby Brian is mistaken for Christ in the manger. He grows up to oppose the Romans, like Jesus. A dialogue in a light-hearted scene comes as a description of apparently agreeable Marxists becoming factional and self-destructive adversaries. Ziaul Hasan’s astute observations on Indian politics in a critical phase of1989, two years before the Soviet Union expired, are prescient. But the dialogue between Brian and his would-be anti-Roman allies also describes the comrades in India, possibly Pakistan too.
Brian: Are you the Judean People’s Front?
Reg: (Expletive)
Brian: What?
REG: Judean People’s Front. We’re the People’s Front of Judea! Judean People’s Front. Cawk … Listen. If you really wanted to join the PFJ, you’d have to really hate the Romans.
Brian: I do!
Reg: Oh, yeah? How much?
Brian: A lot!
Reg: Right. You’re in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the (expletive) Judean People’s Front.
People like Ziaul Hasan were trained to see early warnings of momentous changes though. One of my favourite senior journalists, Zia sahib was a crucial witness to the highs and lows of communist idealism in India. He was among the better-informed professionals of his generation not least because communist intellectuals of his time were required to keep their ear faithfully to the ground. Nikhil Chakravarty was another from that generation of amazingly informed cluster of professionals who peaked between 1970s and 1980s.
Recently Zia sahib’s daughter Saba Hasan, a celebrated artist, published some of his columns. I hope to share the important insights sometime soon.
Tomes have been written about the collapse of the Soviet Union 25 years ago. But I liked how Fidel Castro responded to a world in disarray, limping markedly to the right. Asked by an Indian journalist why he would not budge from his singularly rigid embrace of Marxism in the middle of the global calamity haunting his comrades, he said: “As the world lurches to the right, I move that much to the left without actually shifting at all from my preferred perch.”
In 1992, Castro agreed to loosen restrictions on religion and even permitted church-going Catholics to join the Communist Party of Cuba. He began describing his country as ‘secular” rather than “atheist”. Pope John Paul II visited Cuba in 1998, the first visit by a reigning pontiff to the island. Castro and the pope appeared side by side in public on several occasions during the visit.
In December 1998, Castro formally reinstated Christmas Day as the official celebration for the first time since its abolition by the Communist Party in 1969. The pope sent a telegram to Castro thanking him for restoring Christmas as a public holiday. Naturally, then, amid the carols and the hymns and the beautiful church services across the globe, a brilliant new memory of another Christmas Day will be gliding through the chorus.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, December 27th, 2016
