16 SOCIAL SCIENTIST There is however a specifically political aspect of the problem which is no less significant. It is, in fact, crucial in the materialisation of tendencies. It works to impede or facilitate and to give a specific shape to the working out of inherent tendencies. In concrete terms, in most of the advanced capitalist states where democracies have survived without interruption, the time lag between economic centralisation and the centralisation of political power has been considerable as well as varying between different societies. The consensus among economists is to trace the development of monopolies to the end of last century and the beginning of this, whereas constitutional analysts would trace concomitant developments in polity to around the 1930's. The time lag as well as the particular ways in which this happened has been due to the political conditions — the nature of division among the ruling class parties, the extent and depth of challenge to the ruling classes by the revolutionary forces, the strength of conventions and traditions, institutional impediments, etc. The way the process works out in different societies is complex and needs empirical determination and therefore cannot be gone into here, although I intend to delineate some of its concrete aspects in the case of India. All that needs to be noted here is thai the centralisation of capital is not the same as the centralisation of state power. These two aspects may interlock or diverge. As a general observation, one can say that in the 'democracies' of the underdeveloped world, unlike the advanced capitalist states, the tendency is for the political aspect to proceed far ahead as is evidenced by the latter-day developments in, apart from India, Ceylon, Malaysia, the Philippines and Mexico. It seems to be the case that in the crisis-ridden capitalist economies of the Third World, containment of popular democratic urges and repression of mass movements compel a much greater degree of centralisation of state power than necessitated by the laws of motion of capital in themselves. It is here in the specificities of the crisis of underdeveloped economies and their political consequences for the ruling classes that the roots of the authoritarian and dictatorical response of the centralised state power lie. This is also what gives a dangerous dimension to the moves toward centralisation and puts the struggle against such moves in the forefront of the democratic struggle. Nature of Political Centralisations In India in particular, the process of political centralisation was facilitated by the more or less uninterrupted rule of the Congress party for the first 30 years both at the Centre and -in most of the States and was necessitated by the challenges to the hegemony of the Congress rule. Behind the Congress manoeuvres were the desperate moves of an insecure bourgeoisie in the face of the mounting crisis of