THE LEFT IN INDIANS FREEDOM MOVEMENT AND IN FREE INDIA 17 ideas and practices. Many other radical partks and organisations are not even formally committed to the ideologies and practices of the working class. The Communist Party—the united party before the split and the CPI(M) since then—has been trying its best to assert the proletarian positions as opposed to alien class positions which are represented and supported by other (petty-bourgeois, bourgeois and even feudal) forces. The continuing class struggle in the realm of ideas, policies and practices is therefore inherent in the situation. This struggle however should be so conducted as to forge the broadest possible unity of anti-imperialist, anti-feudal, anti-monopoly and anti-authoritarian democratic forces. It is with this idea that the CPI(M) gives the perspective of a People's Democratic Front which is necessarily led by the working class. The Left and Democratic Front which the Pfcrty advances as an immediate perspective, may not be led by the working cl^ss but the working class and its firmest allies—mass of peasantry—play a positive role in the Left and Democratic Front. While try ing to develop such a Left and Democratic Front based on a programme which is opposed to the programme of all bourgeois, landlord and petty-bourgeois patties, the CPI(M) strives to develop the broadest possible unity of action on tHe largest number of issues affecting the life of the people. To sum up, this overall review of the left movement in the country, the Left and Democratic Front which is in the process of formation now, is a continuation of but qualitatively different—different in its class content and therefore its ideology or world outlook, its political programme, the forms of its militant struggle, mode of revolutionary organisation, etc.— from the left that took shape exactly eight decades ago. While the latter was the path-finder of a new class—the bourgeoisie with its petty-bourgeois following—the present left movement symbolises a growing working cl^ss which is finding allies in the other anti-imperialist, anti-feudal, anti-monopoly democratic forces, the mass of peasantry above all. 1. M.A. Persits, Revolutionaries of India in Soviet Russia, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1983. 2. G. Adhikari (ed). Documents on the History of the Communist Party oftndia^ Peoples Publishing House, 1982.