2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Nuclear disarmament, however, as the note by Vivek Monteiro argues, would require a sustained political struggle by the peace forces all over the world against the regimes in the NATO countries, and the U.S. in particular. This requires the building up of a broad world-wide coalition of pro-disarmament forces, for which, according to the author, the conditions today are propitious. In any such international struggle for peace and against the nuclear threat, India can and must obviously play a crucial role. But the legitimacy required for such a role would be lost to her if she persists with the current national policy of "nuclear ambiguity" instead of clearly taking the initiative of coming to an agreement with our neighbours on the exclusion of nuclear weapons from the sub-continent. The piece bv Deb Kumar Bose touches on the same theme. With the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan on the horizon, pressure is building up in India for developing her own atomic arsenal. Bose attacks the position of the bomb-lobby, warns the progressive forces not to line up behind this lobby and urges support for the democratic struggle of the people of Pakistan against the imperialist-backed military dictatorship.'India'slnuclearpolicyiis an importan ((and sensitive subject on which extensive discussion and debate are needed in the country. We hope that the pieces by Monteiro and Bose which take forthright positions on the subject, would stimulate such a debate. Dasgupta's paper on the anti-colonial peasant struggles in late eighteenth century Bengal explores the nature of the class alliance underlying the struggle and the contradictions which informed it. It makes the important point that the objective situation, instead of sharpening the autonomous consciousness of the oppressed peasantry, discouraged, on the contrary, a snapping of their traditional dependence on oilier classes. The paper by Jagannath Pathy studies the nature of U.S. intervention in shaping the strategy of agricultural development in a number of Tliird World countries including India. Finally we carry an obituary piece byjayati Ghosh on Simone de Beauvoir, the outstanding French intellectual of the Left and author of the pioneering work The Second Sex, who passed away recently.