COMMUNICATIONS 69 favourable context. His socio-economic circumstances must be thoroughly analysed so that the general law reveals itself through the particular. My analysis shows how for the Assamese bourgeoisie the revolutionary potentiality is continually blocked and braked, and how it gets characteristically diverted to fascist blind alleys. The price of stagnation under imperialism and under big capital is not only poverty and squalor, but ideological reaction. The fascist tendency will always be there, will in fact be strengthened under the patronage of big capital, until swept away by the rising tide of the working-class movement. It will be naive to expect that a local working-class movement in Assam will win over the middle class on its own. My article was primarily concerned with middle-class bankruptcy and its consequences. The Assamese middle class has now ceased to be a progressive force because of its alliance with big capital. This is not to deny that it may once again become progressive, provided it chooses to follow the lead given by the working masses of India. But that implies a substantial reorientation of ideas and goals. Guha and Das themselves note that large sections of the working class in Assam are actually from outside the state, and are politically weak and unorganized. The working class is far from the position of leadership that Guha and Das postulate as the ideal condition for evoking the revolutionary potentiality of the middle class. Under these circumstances their optimism regarding die middle class must be considered somewhat Utopian. But I had better underline that in my article I had not put the middle class in the enemy camp. In fact the reactionary forces have grasped the situation much better and made ample use of their knowledge. In this connection I should like to draw the attention of Guha and Das to the remarkable tradition of student and youth activity in Assam. The standard work on the freedom movement in Assam, K N Dutta's Landmarks of the Freedom Struggle in Assam1 observes that the Assam Students5 Conference was formed in 1916 before student movements developed on an all-India scale. The Students5 Conference was instrumental in creating a cadre of dedicated student leaders who played an important part in the freedom movement. Gandhi in 1922 commented admiringly on the youthful patriotism of the students of Assam.2 Some of the outstanding leaders of the present-day left parties also had their initial training in student movements. The same potentiality is there among Assamese students today. But the weakness of the working-class struggle in the rest of India has so far insulated them from the kind of activity that matters. Ill Guha and Das have rejected, wrongly I think, the category of 'regional bourgeoisie5 as unhelpful in inquiry. They would like to substitute the familiar term 'petty-bourgeoisie5. Mao Tse-tung's views, however, are of not much use here simply because the Indian situation is different from that of China. China has not seen the rise of distinct and numerous