p I don’t think there is any point of dispute between ourselves. I thought I was raising the issue to say that the whole question of decentralisation of power is very complicated. My own view is that we need to throw the label out of the window; throw out federalism out of the window; throw out unitary state out of the window - because that restricts the framework of our debate — whereas indeed the debate should be about on the necessity for taking power closer to the people, which indeed means decentralisation of power. Yet on the other hand, and it may seem to be contradictory, you would want a central government that has specific and sufficient power to fulfill its obligations to the population as a whole and so in a sense, we are opposed to the idealist position of federalism because it has several specific connotations. But I was interested in what happens in India, because India has enough experience where the central government intervenes because it has a Communist government, whether it was Kerala in the beginning or whetheritis West Bengal now,intermsof attempting to restrict the capacity of these regional power bases to do certain things. I was just raising that as issues for us to discuss further. But frankly speaking in my own view we really must move away from notions which were imposed on us in terms of whether it is a federal state or unitary state, we got to look concretely at the issues of the relationship that would exist between different levels of government, with a view that we have certain objectives that we are to achieve and we need to achieve them. That was the first question.

The second element which I was interested in and hoping that Jyoti Basu would say something, was the question of the relationship between exercising power, in this case what you call state power in 375 India, and in West Bengal where the Left has been for power for 16 yean, how does it impact, to what extent doesit actually impact on thenational sector. What are the problems in taking the experience of West Bengal and making them more broadly acceptable. It is my own understanding of course, that even if the CPI(M) have certainly made powerful bases in certain states but there is still a problematthe national level, intermsof perhaps winning elections to the central government. So I was very interested to have the experience of comrades from West Bengal, we do not have that experienceatall,excepttotalkaboutthis.SoIwould ask Com. Basu to help us in this field.