PROBLEMS OF NATIONAL UNITY 55 forces asserting themselves. The unified Indian national state emerged out of an all-India movement waged jointly by the people of all linguistic groups against British imperialism. The historical experience of British rule in the sub-continent and the common struggle of the Indian people laid the foundation for the formation of the Indian national state. As other perceptive observers have pointed out, this was a twin process of operating at two levels.1 At the all-India level the unity in the anti-imperialist struggle broke down, however incompletely, the barriers of caste, religion and language. At the regional level, it awakened the nascent linguistic-nationality consciousness of different nationalities. This was broadly a movement for democracy and national emancipation also. Just as at the all-India level, likewise in the various regions the assertion of linguistic-nationality was a process towards breaking down pre-capitalist barriers of caste and parochial concerns, and promoting the urge to use one mother-tongue and develop their language as a badge of nationality. The regional stream also faced obstacles given the class correlations developing in a retarded capitalist development, but its flowering immensely strengthened the pan-Indian mainstream of the national movement, This was by itself not a unique phenomenon. Lenin had pointed out this dual process in the formation of nations in the historical period of capitalist development. What however is specific to India is its immense complexity. The nation-formation process is complicated by a host of major nationalities, by a multiplicity of developed languages and most of all by the myriads of caste divisions and religious diversity. No other multinational country has the problem in such a magnitude. The development of capitalism in such a multi-structural and multinatioal society has brought forth a complex problem of how to forge and maintain national unity. Betrayal by the Big Bourgeoisie In the independence struggle, the two streams—pan-Indian and the regional nationality aspirations—combined in the struggle against imperialism, for self-determination. We do not wish to go into the fact that the degree of linguistic-nationality development varied from region to region. It is also to be noted that property relations and the old superstructural elements acted as a brake to retard the nationality-formation process or to delay its development. However, it must be noted that the anti-imperialist freedom struggle provided the motive power for the formation of Indian nationalism alongside the basic process of capitalist development. In the independence struggle led by the Congress, the two streams were combined by the national movement under Gandhi as the compulsions of bringing the people into the movement required recognition of their legitimate linguistic-nationality aspirations also.