60 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Apportioning Blame Among the five contributors, Damodaran distinguishes himself from the others in one respect. He traces the failure of Indian Marxism not merely to the intellectual immaturity and weaknesses of India's own Marxists, but also to the incorrect, 'sectarian' lead given by the Communist International under Stalin : After the death of Lenin in January 1924, the Comintcrn's approach to the national movements began to change gradually. The ECCI Report on India, prepared on the eve of the Fifth Congress held in June 1924, set the task of Indian communists as follows : 'Restoration of the national liberation movement (abandoned by the big bourgeoisie) on a revolutionary basis; formation of a national peoples' party which is to comprise the urban petty bourgeoisie, the pauperised intellectuals, the small clerks, the rebellious peasantry and the advanced workers; establishment of a proletarian class party . . .'8 This, according to Damodaran, is the beginning of the disastrous^ 'sectarian' course which misled Indian Marxists. Quoting extensively from the documents of the Comintern, he comes to the conclusion that the international general headquarters of the world revolutionary movement has been 'a sectarian mislcader', rather than a genuine leader, of Indians revolutionary movement. The once-practising Indian Marxist, who has taken refuge within the portals of the university, thus seems to demarcate himself from his academic colleagues in that he wants to divert to the world leaders of the Marxist-Leninist movement the major part of the blame which they (the academics) arc putting on the leadership of India's communist movements It is far from our intention to claim that either the international communist leadership during the days of Stalin and after or the Indian communists are free from the sectarian mistakes about which Damodaran speaks. Sectarianism has no doubt made its appearance in the international movement, though we beg to disagree that sectarianism has been the sole mistake committed by it. Twin Dangers As Lenin has clearly warned, the twin dangers of opportunism and sectarianism, or rather right and left opportunism, are ever present and are twin brothers rather than the opposites of each other. Developing this idea further, Stalin answered the question "which is the greater danger—right or left opportunism?", with '^that will become the greater danger against which you cease to fight". One would therefore have liked Damodaran and other research workers to make a painstaking study of how, in the course of the development of the international movement, each of two dangers successively made its appearance and how each of them damaged the process of world revolution. Instead of making such a non-partisan, objective study of the