One moment loud carols in Bengali seemed to echo up and down Kolkata’s Park Street, the next minute the familiar silhouette of a small woman in a white and blue saree striding purposefully onstage appeared on the big screen at the open-air Christmas celebration that would go on for a couple of days. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s appearance at Allen Park seemed that evening part of a docudrama of Kolkata’s secularism. Against the backdrop of Madhya Pradesh where carol-singing clergy were detained by the police on suspicion of forced conversions and in Aligarh (Uttar Pradesh) where schools were warned by
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