28 SOCIAL SCIENTIST development by merging hundreds of native States with India, by keeping the units of the federation under tight control, and creating the all-India-based infrastructure in economic development. But with the maturing of the economic and political crisis which accompanied the growing weight of the monopolists, the dispossession of broad strata of petty producers and small capitalists and the increased burden on the working people, the over-centralisation which occurred after 1967 was purely retrogade in character and had no historical justification whatsoever. It was over-centralisation resulting from the narrow class interest of the monopoly sections of the Indian bourgeoisie which could not render any real service to the cause of Indian economic development. Hence such over-centralisation did not have behind it even such historical sanction as the centralisation of the earlier period could have invoked. The call for loosening the tight grip of the Centre therefore is specially pertinent in this later period. It may be argued of course that since bourgeois-landlord rule in India cannot solve the basic economic and political problems faced by the people, simply giving more autonomy to the States makes no fundamental difference to the situation; without the removal of the class rule of the bourgeoisie and the landlords there cannot be any solution to the people's problem merely by ensuring greater decentralisation of power. But the present context of Indian social revolution is the achievement of democracy for the people. The movement for decentralisation of power at the current juncture, by mobilising the masses in different parts of the country, will help strengthen the forces of democracy against the forces of autocracy. 1 Marx and Engels, The Civ 1 War 2 See Hans Kohn Nationalism and Liberty, the Swiss Example George, Alien and Unwin, London, 1956, p 22. 3 "The Revolutionary Movements of 3840" published in the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung, January 23, 1848. The English translation is given in Appendix D to "The Communist Manifesto" with an introduction and explanatory notes by D Ryazanoff, Burman Publishing House, Calcutta, 1944. pp 222-233. 4 Engels wrote: "Now when the democrats are supporting the struggle of ihe civilised, industrial, modern-democratic part of Switzerland against the uncultured Christian-Teutonic democjacy of the cattle-keeping primary cantons, they are the representatives of progress, they cease to show the least kinship to reaction, they make it clear that they are grasping the significance of democracy in the ninmeteenth century". Quoted by Ryazanoflf in his Explanatory Note No. 60, pp 198-200, ibid. Marx was a signatory along w th Jule Valles, Moses Hess, Wilhelm Wolff and others to a written appeal issued in support of the Swiss radicals, ibid. p 200, 5 B N Rau, Constitutional Adviser, in his Introduction to the Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation. Videlr-s Constitutional Precedent, Second Series, Constituent Assembly of India, Third Edn, 1947, p 191.