82 SOCIAL SCIENTIST Failure to Differentiate Ideology from Practice Kothari is unable to differentiate between ideology and practice,. or to be more precise, between rhetoric and reality. That is why he cannot see the rationality of progressive ideology and its function in legitimising the system. Kothari observes that in India ^there is no scope for the politics of the right9 ', yet he remains unconvinced that in a poor society commitment to "socialism' is a necessary component of the political theory of the ruling classes. Kothari docs not attempt to critically analyse the ideology of the Congress Party. This leads him to the illusion that the Congress has. made left and right irrelevant in Indian politics. This is tantamount to saying that the Congress party is a ^party of the people', a logic which can only be based on the assumption that political parties are above class interests. In India no single class is dominant. As a result the Congress and other political parties represent a confluence of class interests. But this does not prevent the State from acting more or less cohesively on behalf of the monopolists, landlords and rich peasants. Undoubtedly, the bourgeois parties exercise a traditional hold over considerable sections of the masses, and make policy statements and formulate programmes which arc determined by the need to maintain a democratic facade. But this docs not detract from their class character. To hold such a view is to fall prey to the propaganda about the so-called non-class and purely democratic character of the Indian State. In the same vein is Kothari's distinction between the Nehru and post-Nehru era, which is well taken if he means that the notable feature of Nehru's political framework was its flexibility which gave greater opportunity to various groups to pursue their political and economic interests. It is surprising that Kothari still subscribes to the theory that the dominance of one party does not conflict with the representation (pp 44-45) of divergent political interests. The acceptance of one -party dominance is based on the misconception that democracy can be the monopoly of a single party, which if at all it means anything, would lead to the erosion of democracy, and to a situation characterised by the centralisation of political power and its concentration in the hands of a few individuals. It is such a development that culminated in the scenario during the emergency in which the Indian union was taken to be the ''political property' of the Congress party ^shareholders' to be governed in the interest of its leading proprietor (s)\ An important aspect ofKothari's explanation of the crisis that has overtaken India during the last decade is that the Indian political system did not intervene effectively to check the growth of powciCul interests which ultimately led to the crisis. Basically, his argument \% that the system was unsuccessful because the leadership did not ensure distributive justice. Kothari blames the urban-based industrialization