How would one react if the Catholic Church was banned in the Vatican? With disbelief, certainly. But with understanding ? Never! So how are to react to the news that the Communist Party has been banned, meaning outlawed, in the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic? If that was a piece news carried by Pravada on April 1, then one could have greeted it with a slight chuckle. But since banning of the party was the result of a presidential decree issued by Boris Yeltsin only the other day. we are at a total loss.

When the communist party was outlawed in the United States In the early '50s nobody batted an eyelid. Many people did not even know there was a communist party In the US to ban In the first place! But the Soviet Union? Where the party had come to symbolise the state itself ? The irony of Yeltsin's decree is so acute as to defy analysis.

Was it not only the other day Yeltsin himself was the party’s Moscow city chief and a candidate-member of the Polltbureau? He certainly was. Did Mikhail Gorbachev not climb to the top of international power and fame on the back of his unstinting service to the party? He certainly did. Was not the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, that unlikely federation of 15 ethnically diverse and often historically hostile regions. Itself the product of the October Revolution and designs of Joseph Stalin who turned a mass of revolutionary fervour into an organised, monolithic and bureaucratic political party? It certainly was. In other words, the USSR tseif was fathered ard brought up to aciiihood by the Party.

And now. that grown up child has disdainfully disowned its once-mighty father! The father has been declared persona non grata in the very house he built! It's almost as if Yeltsin is organising a grand New Year's bash, but has told the head of the family to stay away because he is too old and decidedly out of fashion, and also because he would be an embarrassment and might even scare the other guests away.

Such is life. All this is happing while the Communist Party enjoys full legal status in all the democratic countries. Including in the United States, that bastion of capitalism and "nest of conspirators." We may soon see Lenin's statue in New Yorii. London.Parls, etc. while no trace of the founder of the Soviet state will remain at any corner of the cities which used to be adorned with his busts. This Is the difference between democracy and other forms of government.