Christmas was a busy time. Each night, including Christmas Day, a play was given and, beforehand, the most varied dinner parties took place at Jaipur House. The chorus - many of whom had to combine singing to the guests with changing in time to take part in the play - sang carols, closing with an exquisite tableau of the Mother and Child. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists sat spell-bound. 'I used to think of Christmas as a drunken orgy,' one distinguished Indian told the Austins. 'I begin to understand what it is all about.'12

On 6 January Radio Tashkent, beamed to India and Pakistan, fired the first in a series of Soviet broadsides against Buchman's tour of India. It was followed on 8 January by a prominently displayed article in Pravda, under a Delhi dateline, and a talk on Moscow Radio's home service entitled 'Buchmanism is the Ideological Weapon of the Warmongers'. Next day the same commentator, Georgi Arbatov, repeated his allegations on Moscow Radio's overseas service. The four reports covered similar ground - the 'Hitlerite' Buchman and his colleagues aimed to 'penetrate into the sphere of India's political life' on behalf of 'American imperialism'. Moral Re-Armament's financial backers, according to the 9 January broadcast, were 'kept a secret' but were known to include Firestone, Rockefeller, the Los Angeles Times, the 'US West Coast Shipping Company and other representatives of the US monopolistic capital'.

Arbatov's home service broadcast was a revised repeat of a talk he had given on the same station on 21 November 1952, stimulated by the publication of Peter Howard's book The World Rebuilt the year before. Arbatov described Moral Re-Armament as 'a universal ideology' and quoted a statement that 'it has the power to attract radical revolutionary minds'. 'Moral Re-Armament', he said, 'supplants the inevitable class war by the "permanent struggle between good and evil"...Moral Re- Armament, in addition to building bridgeheads on each continent and training cadres who would be capable of spreading the Buchmanite ideology among the masses, has now started on its decisive task, the total expansion of Buchmanism throughout the world.' In this revised version he added a description of the current Indian visit. 'The American press in India has raised a great to-do, glamourising Buchman and propagating his ideas,' Arbatov remarked, while the 'Indian democratic press', in which connection he quoted Blitz, 'reacted differently'.

This attack had, at first, little impact. The musical Jotham Valley was given for 20,000 party workers at the All-India Congress Party Conference at Hyderabad, as they prepared for their public meetings of 200,000. The Nizam of Hyderabad sponsored a special showing solely for his family, household and government. His Chief Minister, who was host to the visitors, invited some to stay on to cope with the interest among his people.

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