14 SOCIAL SCIENTIST that is no singular accident. The call to 'modernity* and communal aggression may easily be two sides of the same coin. The rise in violence—including familial violence—against women in our society, cannot be separated from the silent but persistent violence with which developing economies are sought to be opened up to the depredations of multinational capital. One recalls the jubilant proposal of the US trade representative, Ms. Caria Hills, to prise open the third world with the crowbar of Super 301. But the ideological and cultural onslaught which impresses 'liberalisation* and 'globalisation' upon our minds as the sole route to development is no less effective a crowbar. Flourishing on the soil of inequality, uneven competition and nonavailability of basic requirements of life for the masses, communal and gender deprivation is then made to seem natural by using the rhetoric of development, or at most by being presented as a momentary aberration. This is done against the background of the inexorable necessity of development, the transcendent unreason of market forces. Those who represent this unreason and manipulate market forces acquire a mythological stature whether they are high-profile politicians, bulls dominating the share-market or charismatic dons of the underworld investing in the film industry. Submission to this sense of inevitability emanating from these mythological figures, seems to be the only alternative. This situation has been no doubt aggravated by the demise of the socialist alternative that had been built up in the Soviet Union and by the economic changes introduced in People's China. Even in non-socialist developing countries like India some of the pre-suppositions of socialism such as equality and the responsibility of the state to ensure certain basic requirements of life to all and to uplift the weaker sections had been admitted within the constitution and the political infrastructure. With the dismemberment of the socialist alternative, however, not only the principle of egalitarianism, but of state secularism and rights of minorities and weaker sections are being jeopardised. The ideological force behind socialist revolutions has been the force of egalitarian reason intervening and shaping history to the best of its ability. If this possibility of intervention is given up as Utopian, then submission to the entrenched power cannot be avoided. What is important here is that the left is being robbed of the language which had been its point of entry into the public arena. It has been the language created by the left which dominant ideology has been constrained to use for 40 years after the end of British rule- Now since the older referents have been deprived of their meaning, it is the language of New Economic Policy on one hand and of religious fascism on the other that is sought to be imposed upon the left as unavoidable terms of reference. During its transition from the Utopian to the Marxist stage in the 19th century socialism had not only provided an opposition within the existing political infrastructure but had provided a