DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT 81 emergency proclaimed by the Indira Gandhi government in 1975, steel workers in the West Bengal- Bihar border were on strike. The management tried to break the strike by bringing in blacklegs from the adjacent rural areas. But the rural people would not oblige the management because of the earlier organizational work there. The resulting tension led to the murder of a political worker who had been active in the rural areas, by the henchmen of the management. Because of the emergency it was not possible to organize a mass meeting. Bat on the morning of the sraddha (obseques for the dead) large numbers of people, each carrying his own food, turned up spontaneously from the adjacent areas to show their respect to the dead so that the sraddha itself took the character of a mass meeting. Worker-Peasant Alliance Two significant points are to be noted here: 1) the forging of alliance between the rural masses and the industrial workers and 2) the possibility of turning traditional social and cultural formations into a political event. On the one hand, one finds a revolutionary content in popular consciousness which provides the basis for joint struggle. On the other hand, it emphasizes the element of communal participation within traditional social and cultural formations which might aid in their revolutionization. The incident has other implications also, for example, spontaneity of people's participation. But one should not lose sight of the fact that this spontaneity was not something inherent, but was developed as a result of organizational work in the area. It developed, in other words, as a result of political intervention. Yet the sraddha was not just a facade for such intervention; it was a genuine communal experience based on religious tradition which developed into its own opposite, that is, a communal experience based on political reality as a result of intervention. Marxian intervention represents the class interest of the proletariat. Just as this might be different from the immediate nterest of the individual proletarians, it might also go beyond the minimum common programme the proletariat shares with its allies —a programme which may not be specifically socialistic. Thug in China, the new-democratic front was an anti-imperialist, anti-feudal one, reinforced by the sporadic participation even of the Chinese national bourgeoisie. But the Chinese Communist Party, representing the Chinese proletariat, sought to retain a firm hold over anti-imperialist, anti-feudal movements while guiding them in the direction of socialism. Mao Zedong says: ^New-democratic politics,