Explained : How Christmas Became a Political Battleground in Majoritarian India and Its Impact

Today is Christmas, a cheery holiday celebrating the birth of a Palestinian who founded one of our big religions based on his message of love, peace, forgiveness, humility, and the idea of a universal fraternity—all ideals that are sorely needed in the current zeitgeist.

Though not a Christian, I have always loved Christmas, perhaps because my parents migrated to northern England in the 1960s, a place out of a Charles Dickens novel. (My father specialised in pulmonary diseases; he said that even children of the mining community smoked because their lungs were already lined with coal dust.)

Christmas was a holiday that emphasised the cosiness of the living room, safe from the snowy night outside, and a decorated tree under which Father Christmas (also known as Santa Claus) would leave wrapped presents while we slept. My mother was a fan of The Beatles, who released singles each Christmas day, though the only song I knew was “Yellow Submarine”.

We migrated to New York City in the 1970s. My homesick parents wanted to return to Bihar, but I got into a good high school, so my father and I stayed. I celebrated Christmas Eve at my friend Craig’s house. His father was a German immigrant working for Lufthansa, and his mother was a schoolteacher who was Jewish but nonetheless hosted a good Christian party that comprised a few family friends, a dinner of a variety of cold cuts (including pig’s tongue and other livestock), rye and black breads, and eggnog. As 14-year-olds, we were not allowed near the bar.

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However, my first Christmas Eve at Craig’s was the first time I got drunk. The eggnog was creamy and milky and tasty and, unknown to me, spiked. Before I knew it, I had several glasses and the room began to slide sideways. “Indira Gandhi’s a commie,” Craig’s grandfather said to me, and I silently stared at his wrinkled face.

Craig and I exchanged presents, always 12-inch vinyl records, and it was exciting to tear-off the wrapping to see what album each of us got. I vividly remember my joy at The Who’s double album Quadrophenia, released earlier that decade, and Billy Joel’s 52nd Street, a 1970s soft rock standard. The album exchanges launched me on a lifetime of melomania (till the digital era, a discussion for some other time).

One notable aspect about Christmas Eve at Craig’s was that the adults got drunk and fought, though I never witnessed it because we were upstairs listening to music and talking about girls. A gay couple that taxied in from Greenwich Village every Christmas Eve once presented Craig with a small pipe. This caused an uproar. I had no idea what the pipe was meant for, but I heard the couple argue with Craig’s parents that the boy was going to “do these things anyway, eventually”. What things, I wondered. “Marijuana,” Craig whispered.

My university years in the early 1980s included Christmas, which was essentially a family outing for dinner and a movie. When I returned to India and began working, Christmas was subdued among my relatives, and the revellers wearing cheap Santa hats or terribly amateur masks, whooping it up in Connaught Place in New Delhi, were not particularly inviting. I sorely missed eggnog.

It was only after I got married and we started a family in the 1990s that Christmas returned with a tree, cake, presents, and zeal. My wife is from the north-east, which has strong Christmas traditions; half of her extended family was from tea plantations in Upper Assam that were formerly dominated by English owners who left behind a culture of brandy, caramel custard, and loudly singing “Jingle Bells”.

The youngsters were always excited as Christmas approached. During that time, their playschools and kindergartens always observed the holiday with class parties and plays centred on the nativity scene. One daughter was an angel, and the son, a Palestinian shepherd.

Demise of secularism

Now the children have flown from the nest, and it’s too much of an effort to drag the artificial tree from storage, and anyway, the whole external environment has become polluted with sectarian poison. Now yuletide greetings are whispered over the phone, not lustily cheered at someone’s doorstep.

In 2014, the government designated December 25 as Good Governance Day to mark former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s birthday. This is ironic because, though micro-governance has markedly improved thanks to technology, India’s broader governance remains as sterile and corrupt as ever. And how can a day celebrating good governance ever capture the popular imagination without bribing people (as is done in elections)? Good governance in India is a contradiction in terms.

The real agenda of designating December 25 alternatively, therefore, is an aggressive majoritarian agenda to attack Christianity and reduce its importance in the national culture.

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On December 18-19, three churches in Chhattisgarh were burnt down. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, on December 23, demanded urgent governmental action to protect Christians from violence, pointing to recent incidents of trinket sellers and carol singers being attacked, as well as a visually impaired girl being assaulted by a local politician in Madhya Pradesh. On November 25, the Supreme Court upheld the 2005 dismissal of Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Kamalesan for refusing to perform arti inside a temple.

And lest we forget, members of the Bajrang Dal murdered, by burning alive, Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two boys in 1999. A local Dal member, Pratap Sarangi, later became a State legislator and is currently a Member of Parliament (and was briefly a Minister). After becoming an MLA, he denied involvement.

December 25 will, for me, forever be Christmas. Our nation has inclusively observed all its religions, and Christianity has been a part of our landscape ever since St Thomas arrived in Kerala in 52 CE. Now more than ever, all of us, irrespective of the faith we follow, need to consciously imbibe Christ’s teachings of love, peace, forgiveness, humility and the idea of a universal fraternity. Merry Christmas to you all! Amen.

Aditya Sinha is a writer living in the outskirts of Delhi.