Basant, the spring festival famous for colourful dancing and kite flying across Punjab, is fading on the Pakistani side, leaving wistful memories for the old and a law-and-order issue for the present generation that observes it in violation of  a 15-year ban. 

Yellow - the ultimate symbol of spring – turned ‘red’ this year, killing and injuring revellers, many falling from rooftops, and many more detained for flouting the ban, a report in the Express Tribune said. 

Over the years, Basant has deteriorated from a cultural event to a commercial show of strength among rival groups who use foul and dangerous means. It came to be termed a crime and was banned in 2007. 

The initial objections had come from the clergy who objected to Basant, a pre-Islamic pastime that went against their faith. 

Sufis and kites 

According to Lochan Singh Buxi, Basant Panchami is a Hindu festival embraced by some Indian Muslim Sufis in the 12th century. The festival was adopted to mark the grave of Muslim Sufi saint dargah of Nizamuddin Aulia in Delhi. Ever since it has been observed by the Chishti order. 

In an evocative article recalling Pakistan’s old times, written in 2018, Haroon Khalid, the author of “Walking with Nanak, In Search of Shiva and A White Trail,” stated:  “For a day or two, a deeply religious society that had gradually shunned its non-Muslim heritage after Partition would suspend its inhibition and make merry. The final show would last a night and day. 

“There were always people who held any association with the country’s non-Muslim traditions as anathema, and they would protest, asking for the festival to be banned. But the state, otherwise never shy to concede ground to the religious right, would turn a deaf ear,” Khalid recalled. 

“The festival was just too important to be abandoned; it was essential to being a Lahori. It was also celebrated in other cities around Punjab, but there was nothing like Lahore’s Basant. Karachi had its sea, Islamabad had its mountains, Lahore had its Basant.” 

Commercialization 

Khalid says the commercialization of Basant began at the turn of the century. “As the military ruler Pervez Musharraf ushered in multinational corporations, the festival was highly commercialized and an industry of event planners, sponsors and concert organizers grew around it.” 

While many with their eyes glued to the kite in the sky fell off the roofs, rivalries made the competitors use the ‘maanja’, or string coated with glass, chemicals and even acid. Birds would get caught and motorcycle riders on the streets got entangled in the strings, causing accidents. 

Fun, folksy, rural and urban, was missing. Inevitably, the Supreme Court of Pakistan intervened in 2005, saying that it endangered public safety and asked the state to ban it. A formal ban was imposed only in 2007. It was subsequently upheld by the Asif Zardari government that lifted it in 2009, only to re-impose it quickly, and later, by the Nawaz Sharif government. 

For the details and statistics that Jawed Zulfiqar trots out in The Express Tribune this month make alarming reading.  He reports the deaths of two nine-year-olds in Rawalpindi, one falling off the roof after being entangled in the kite string and the other dying of a bullet wound amidst celebratory firing. 

Basant fatalities 

The report details a rising graph of deaths, injuries to scores of people in major cities and across the Punjab countryside and of arrests of people, either flying kites or possessing deadly strings and those engaged in firing. 

The revellers, reports say, play hide and seek with the police that watches them through binoculars and clear out if the lawmen raid their place.   

Although people also light fireworks and play loud music, the objectionable part of the activity appears to be kite flying.  The civil society members believe that kite flying is not worth the joy it brings as it directly contributes to mourning elsewhere. Many suggestions have been put forth to make the activity safer, but so far, the ban has proven to be the most effective way – or ineffective, going by the casualties and accidents. 

A culture buff, Haroon Khalid had warned in 2018 that “if the ban is not lifted, and soon, Basant will become a fading memory, another cultural treasure lost. Only a handful of people in Punjab today remember celebrating Lohri or Baisakhi like festivals were meant to. Is the same fate awaiting Basant?” 

Four years on, the ban continues and so does its flouting.  Perhaps, Khalid was riding against the state’s determination and, possibly, general public disapproval. The former is clear, the latter is difficult to determine. 

With the ban in force - whatever its impact - Basant, a celebration of nature and culture, may soon become a matter of the past in Pakistan. Kite flying, one of its main components, is likely to become something of a collective public celebration, a clandestine fun only in its flouting of the law.

(The author is a veteran journalist and commentator on South Asian affairs. Views are personal. He can be contacted at mahendraved07@gmal.com)