THEORETICAL ASPECTS OF NATIONAL QUESTION 13 dialectical approach to the problem posed by India's multinationality. While waging a principled struggle to safeguard the legitimate rights of the nationalities and to defend their rights in the sphere of language and culture, they must conduct an unremitting struggle to foster and safeguard the unity of the working peoples of all nationalities. Since the multi-nationality in India means the class oppression of all nationalities by the big bourgeois-landlord combine, uniting the working people of all nationalities to fight this common oppression is an urgent task. The national question has to be used as a class weapon in the interests of the working class and toiling people of all nationalities. Stalin pointed out with reference to Russia: "It is not the national but the agrarian question that decides the fate of progress in Russia. The national question is a subordinate one.5'5 The national question in tsarist Russia assumed importance as part of the anti-feudal, anti-imperialist tasks of the revolution against tsarism. Similarly in India where semi-feudalism dominates the countryside, the agrarian question is the crux of the democratic revolution. It is in this context and subordinate to it that the national question assumes importance. To unleash the tremendous potential of the millions of peasantry, the agrarian revolution has to take into account their linguistic, cultural and national aspirations. The national question in India therefore can be satisfactorily settled only with the people's democratic revolution. The recomposing of the Indian Union, with a democratic state structure, genuine equality of all Indian languages and free flowering of diverse national cultures, is a historic task possible only with the voluntary union of all the Indian nationalities in a people's democracy. ' J V Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, Moscow 1912. 2 Report of the Industrial Planning and Licensing Policy, 1967. 8 Ajit Roy/'Some Aspects of the National Question in India/ ^ Marxist Review, Calcutta, October 1967, p 22. 4 People's Democracy^ 7 August 1966. 5 J V Stalin, op. cit.