24 SOCIAL SCIENTIST neously against the Congress brand ofAkhandaBharat and the Muslim League's "two nations theory" was inseparable from the effort to take India's struggle for freedom, democracy and modernization to a successful conclusion. This struggle often isolated us from the mainstream of the freedom movement. This, howevet, tempered our will to fight the bourgeoisie and its class allies, rallying larger and larger sections of the working people under the banner of proletarian revolution in India and abroad- That was why, alone among the left forces in the country, we were able to organize such gigantic militant movements as Bengal's Tebhaga, Andhra's Telengana, Malabar, Maharashtra's Warii area, and so on in the post-war and post-independence years. The fact that certain serious errors were committed in the process did not prevent us from securing the support of still larger sections of the people. This became clear when, in the first general elections that took place under the new Constitution framed after the attainment of independence, the Communist Party became the major opposition group in Parliament and in four states; in two out of the four, the Party, together with its allies, came almost to the point of securing a majority an the legislature and forming a coalition government. Just five years later, the Party actually secured a majority in one legislature, following which it formed its own state government. This is an honour reserved only for the Communist Party. In the subsequent years when the Party came to be split, the stronger of the two became the major constituent of the coalition and government that came into existence consisting of left and other opposition parties. Today too, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) is heading coalitions and governments in three states—a position which is occupied by no other party, group or organization. The political developments of 1980 once again underscored the truth of what is stated above. The year witnessed the disintegration of all parties of the bourgeois-landlord ruling classes; the strongest of them, though in power at the Centre and in the majority of states, is riven with internal conflicts and rapidly losing its hold on the people. The same fate is overtaking all those opposition parties which refuse to take the principled position of fighting for democracy and in defence of the interests of the working people and for this purpose cooperating with the left. A movement is, therefore, on to unite all the left and other opposition forces on the basis of a modest programe of serving the people and fighting the ruling classes. It is, therefore, surprising that some people, including Rajasekhara Shetty about whom reference has been made in this article, should talk of "Marx having failed in Hindu India". Nearly half-a-century of political developments in India has, on the contrary? shown that all bourgeois ideologies, including Shetty's own "Class,