NATIONALIST MOVEMENT 35 dependence obliges the ruling classes to give up their own proclaimed anti-imperialist policies. Many such policies,as on nationalization,are being given up; such restrictions, as on the percentage of shares permitted to be owned by foreigners, are being relaxed. India is in fact unable to adopt those uncompromising anti-imperialist positions which many Asian and African countries are bold enough to adopt. Both internally and externally therefore, the national problem remains unsolved, leading to the emergence of several problems like asteism, communalism, and separatism—linguistic, provincial and regional. These have, in certain regions (like Kashmir, Nagaland and Mizoram), led to such a deterioration of the situation that the discontented have to be kept in subjection through semi-military means—a situation which is taken advantage of by imperialism. It is therefore necessary for us to examine the essence of the national question in its external as well as internal aspects. Burden of the Past It should, at the very outset, be borne in mind that the leaders of the national movement, being essentially bourgeois nationalists, were unable to have a comprehensive understanding of the problem as a whole; their class interests, reflected in the socio-economic theories which guided their activities, made them totally incapable of finding a proper solution for any one of the innumerable problems whose totality makes up Indians national problem. Let us begin with the internal aspect of the national question. The problem, after all, is primarily one of so reorganizing the social, economic, cultural and political institutions of the nation as to make it a modern bourgeois nation. The external element of nationalism (the urgency of ending tlie foreign rule) made its appearance when the internal forces proved incapable of completing the process of modernization. India, as is well known, has an ancient civilization of which its people are rightly proud. This ancient civilization however is not an unmixed blessing. It meant that, unlike Europe which, in historic times has had three successive social formations—slavery, feudalism and capitalism—the birth of each being accompanied by an all-round revolution in social life, India has had a relatively unchanging society. (We use the term "relatively unchanging", since changes were tmperceptably taking place in the social order. These changes however were taking place within the framework of the very same combination of the three distinct social institutions of the caste, the village community and the joint family). As Karl Marx pointed out in one of his penetrating studies on the nature of Indian society before the British overlordship, all the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid and destructive as the successive action in Hindustan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms