Yuletide spirit

Judging by appearances, never did India witness so merry a Christmas the last this millennium as is being celebrated today. Very few, howe...

Judging by appearances, never did India witness so merry a Christmas the last this millennium as is being celebrated today. Very few, however, will accept the assumption underlying such a claim: that, the more the official greetings to a minority community on the occasion, the merrier the festival.

The fact is that this is a Christmas of special but rather sad significance for the country. The day comes after nearly a year of shameful events, accompanied by a specious debate, targeted at the Christian community. It comes immediately in the wake of attempts to create another temple8217; issue after Ayodhya aimed at menacing another minority and in a tribal part of Gujarat that has seen the worst scenes of anti-Christian violence with the exception of the brutal killing of Graham Staines and his two children in Orissa. Only sophistry of the most cynical kind can deny the strident and sordid role played in all this by the sangh parivar. The damage cannot be undone, and the wound healed, by merely triteofficial statements and tokenism.

Messages to the minority in danger of being alienated, emanating from high places and august offices cannot, by themselves, sound as if they were really meant. Those who were calling for a constitutional debate on conversions, even as Dangs was burning and similar diabolism was being perpetrated elsewhere, need to do much more to earn credibility on this score.

Not merely in terms of administrative action. Nor in those of anything so spiritually demanding as soul-searching. But in terms of political rethinking, informed by a rudimentary se-nse of responsibility for the country they have come to rule. This, alas, is a tall order.

Far more realistic is the hope that the peace-loving majority of the Indian people will pause and reflect on what has come to pass, on what they should not allow to pass any more. With no allegedly ideological baggage to carry, and no issues on the back burner8217; to inhibit them, it is they who can be expected to engage in a collective exerciseof introspection.

This Christmas is a very good time, indeed, for them to begin to ask themselves questions that cannot be evaded any longer. The main question, of course, is: what has been happening to our avowedly cherished value of tolerance? It is no use pretending India has never had communal riots, but what has given rabid intolerance a new respectability? What has helped communal extremists make a till recently unlikely addition to their armoury of collective hate objects? How did they succeed in replacing the unplanned Muslim family, as a bugbear to impart the majority community a minority-in-the-making complex, with Christian conversions that had caused no comparable consternation all these centuries? The answer is obvious. And, it is time for the people to wake to the threat from acceptance of insecurity-inculcating tactics as part of the power tussle, as a political instrument, as a means of mass mobilisation.

If they do, candles won8217;t be lit and carols sung in vain this December 25 in acountry which should count Christianity as part of its proud and precious pre-colonial heritage.