SOCIAL SCIENTIST A second admirable facet of his personality was his intellectual open-mindedness. I remember a discussion he initiated in Delhi University Marx Club on Khrushchev's report. When a participant asked the daring question whether it was possible for a socialist country to interfere in the internal affairs of an independent non-socialist country and even attack it. Comrade Namboodiripad advised the questioner to be even bolder and to include even a socialist country in the victim category. Leaders of a socialist country were, he said, not infallible and were quite capable of serious errors of judgement in self or national interest. Comrade Namboodiripad also tried all his life to overcome a major weakness of the Indian left, namely its failure to make a concrete study of a concrete situation. This he did not only by doing so in his many concrete historical, economic and political studies, but by encouraging others to do so. I remember that when I told him after a visit to Patiala in 1995 that serious land reform legislation has been enacted in the PEPSU, he immediately asked me to put him in touch with the person who had made such a study. Similarly, when he heard in late 1950's that Dr. Sulekh Guptha was putting forth the view that capitalist elements in Indian agriculture were fast growing, he immediately asked to arrange a long discussion with Dr. Gupta and he spent several hours in discussing the issue with him. The achievement of independence in 1947 aroused high hopes and aspirations among the Indian people. The years since then have been years of success and failure, of fulfillment and disappointment, of efforts to implement the agenda laid down by the freedom struggle. Development of independent India has been shaped by three movements and their legacies: there has been the impact of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and of Marxism, Socialism, and the Russian Revolution, and the direct legacy of the freedom struggle, which also incorporated the legacies of the first two and imparted to the Indian people a strong commitment to secularism and democracy, which were to inform all areas of life—political, economic, social and cultural and lead to the building of a society without class or caste domination and in which all the Indian people would have the full opportunity to grow. Moreover, the freedom struggle was the legacy of all the Indian people and not only of any one political party, class or group. The liberals, Gandhians, Nehruites, Socialists and Communists all