The Envisioning of a Nation: A Defence of the Idea of India of blind circumstances, but essentially of the people's consciousness. If it has been so created, it can also be destroyed once ideas change. In the last ten years or so we have actually seen established nations destroyed, such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The bulk of the people of the Soviet Union, according to all accounts, did not wish to see their nation broken up, as was clear from the only referendum that was held on the issue (1990). Yet, since the people were not vigilant enough, power came into the hands of a small group that undertook a violent campaign of falsehoods in the name of Russian nationalism, invoking even Czarist symbols, and ideologically confusing and disarming a whole people. What consequences this has had for the former territories of the Soviet Union, especially Russia, is for everyone now to see, as falling production, beggary and starvation stalk the land, which once contained the world's second superpower. Such lessons are important for us in India. If we too are not vigilant, if we too lose the battle of ideas, as we did in the case of the Pakistan demand in 1947, then India too may not be safe as a nation. It is, therefore, time for everyone to realize that the present BJP government is not just another bourgeois regime, and that its' chauvinistic and basically fascist ideology would not be modified by the compulsions of governance, as is so often fondly hoped. Special responsibility in this struggle for protecting the nation rests on the Left forces: their great advantage is that Marxism provides the most cogent arguments against communalism and all divisive and antidemocratic tendencies. As such, it is the duty of all Marxists to help build a united front of all secular and truly nationalist forces to take up cudgels against the forces of "Hindutva" and all other fundamentalist and parochial ideologies. This would be a splendid way of defending the legacy of Comrade EMS, who had taken to heart, all his life, the dictum of Karl Marx that the task of philosophers is not only to interpret the world, but also to change it.