2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST would any socialist path remain a chimera, but even the basic tasks of the democratic revolution would remain uncompleted, was constrained by the Congress leadership, which more or less forced the Left to break away from it and organise through stages the Communist Party. Kapil Kumar likewise is of the view that the Congress leadership functioned with a twin-objective: while fighting imperialism it strove quite clearly to curb the Left and the Kisan Sabha. Few of course would deny that the Left committed mistakes from time to time in its assessment of the situation ; the difference relates to the validity of the overall strategic conception of the Left and the communists in particular. The crucial question, as emphasised in the paper by B.T. Ranadive, relates to the role of the agrarian revolution. The National Liberatk Struggle can lead on to a struggle for socialism via the agrarian revolution. Working class hegemony over the National Liberation Struggle serves precisely to link this struggle with the agrarian revolution. Bourgeois hegemony over the National Liberation Struggle by contrast delinks this struggle from the agrarian revolution. In the process however it does not even carry through the democratic revolution to its completion ; the result, as in free India, is a superimposition of capitalist development upon precapitalist structures, which not only arrest the vigour of capitalist development, but greatly enhance the burden upon the people and preserve the soil upon which casteist, communalist and localist ideologies thrive. Indeed in the context of capitalist development of this kind, which brings in its train the familiar quota of aggrandisement, impoverishment, frustrations and disappointments, there is a danger of these ideological perceptions which are disruptive of the unity of the working people, getting strengthened over time, as has happened in our country. The politics of compromise and bargaining with the British, which the bourgeois leadership of the National Movement adopted as a necessary counterpart to its efforts to keep a tight leash upon mass struggles, lest they develop into a torrent leading to an agrarian revolution, had a tragic consequence according to E.M.S. Namboodiripad, namely the partition of the country. Gandhi alone of the entire leadership saw in partition the tragedy of the freedom that had been won. The very incompletness of the democratic revolution, however, imposes according to the author a certain continuity, though in changed circumstances, to the task of the Left. The Left cannot just forget about the completion of the democratic revolution now that the country is free from foreign rule ; on the contrary it has to struggle now, as it sought to struggle earlier, for completing the basic tasks of the democratic revolution, at the centre of which is the agrarian question.