20 SOCIAL SCIENTIST This is an elemental process and the masses are learning by trial and error. This process has to be accelerated. The real education of the masses, as Lenin taught, cannot be separated from the revolutionary struggle. It is the experience of this struggle that changes consciousness. The developing agrarian unrest shows that big mass struggles are in the offing. To give them cohesive guidance is the task before the left and democratic forces, the working class and the CPI (M). It is these backed by the action of the working class that will change the balance of consciousness in the country. But simultaneously the working class and the Communist movement must overcome a continuing weakness of theirs. The ideology of the ruling classes which intervenes in the social struggle and disrupts the common movement cannot be defeated without a simultaneous ideological struggle against it. The practical activity of the masses must be accompanied by ideological struggle. The Communist and left movements have been extremely weak in discharging this task, in materialist criticism of religion and its reactionary social manifestations in India. The bourgeois leadership did not discharge this task. The working class movement also neglected it. Only tactical approaches to the issues as they arise without a basic onslaught on the postulates of reactionary ideologies has led to confusion and opportunism in practice. This weakness has to be overcome. The ideologies influencing the people of India—religion, casteism, communalism—arc as much subject to the economic development of society as anywhere else. They continue to operate in a modified or changed form because the social conditions for their sustenance, continue to exist, there having been no revolutionary transformation of Indian society. In tlie present stage they also serve the needs of the ruling classes—the bourgeois-landlord alliance. They help the game of the imperialists to disintegrate the unity of the country. The intervention of the reactionary ideologies is to be combated by the active intervention of the ideology that serves the democratic and revolutionary interest of the people. All the bourgeois-landlord parties are indifferent towards this ideological fight. The democratic and working class forces must unfold a planned attack while leading the mass struggles.