D Aijaz Ahmed following Stalin, argues that nations are creations of capitalism, and that nationalism is therefore bourgeois and retrogressive. I rather hold the alternative position, which I choose to associate with Gramsci, that nationalism per se is neither progressive nor retrogressive, nor does it have a distinct class content prior to its incorporation in the discourse of a particular class or a particular power bloc which arises in particular and determinate historical circumstances. The real issue is: Whose nationalism? For, our experience in Asia is that the nationalist ideology can lead to the liberation of Vietnam in one place, and to the partition of India in another. 135 Even anti-colonial nationalism can be viewed as being unconditionally progressive only if we view it strictly and exclusively in relation to the tasks of decolonization. But our historical experience is that anti-colonial nationalism itself, in so far as it organizes itself in the form of an emergent counter-state, typically has not one but two distinct trajectories: the dismantling of the colonial apparatus, and the construction, in its place, of a new social order corresponding to the interests of the classes or the political bloc leading the anti-colonial struggle itself. That latter trajectory—of assembling the post-colonial systems of power—can be, and in the case of India undoubtedly was, highly contradictory. Communist historiography has always emphasized, and there are now superb historians of a younger generation who are documenting for us, with very considerable historical data, how any number of legitimate movements of the popular classes and strata in our own society were repressed during the anti-colonial struggle in the name of the 'nation". Thus, anti-colonial nationalism itself can be—in fact, has been historically—not only a liberating but also a repressive force. Furthermore, we have by now accumulated enough historical experience to see that the type of state that arises with the successful conclusion of the anti-colonial struggles continues to be capable of exercising all kinds of repressions and brutalities in order to suppress legitimate dissent and the essential pluralities of our society. In the India of today one does not have to be a communalist—one does not have to deny the existence of all sorts of terrorists and madmen in our midst—to posit that there are issues—of re-distribution of powers between centre and region, between men and women, between the dominant and the subordinate classes, even between ethnic and religious communities—which are constantly suppressed in the name of 'the nation', national culture, national mainstream, and so on. Clearly, if one stands in such a problematic, such contradictory relation with one's own nationalism, it is all the more difficult to subscribe to the idea that there is some uniform Third World, with a unified nationalism of its own, which is the determinate ideology of our era and the only possible alternative to the post-modernist vagaries of Late Capitalism. Numbers 17-18