Shortly after India became free, the last British commander in chief of the Indian Army, Gen. Claude Auchinleck, wrote: “The Sikhs may try to set up a separate regime. I think they probably will and that will be only a start of a general decentralization and break-up of the idea that India is a country, whereas it is a subcontinent as varied as Europe. The Punjabi is as different from a Madrassi as a Scot is from an Italian. The British tried to consolidate it but achieved nothing permanent. No one can make a nation out of a continent of many nations.”
Another former British official who was in India during the first general elections of 1952 wrote home that “a future and more enlightened age will view with astonishment the absurd farce of recording the votes of millions of illiterate people.”
Speaking in Cambridge in 1880, a high official of the British Raj named Sir John Strachey said that the “first and most essential thing to learn about India” is that “there is not, and there never was an India”. Strachey thought it “conceivable that national sympathies may arise in particular Indian countries”, but “that they should ever extend to India generally, that men of the Punjab, Bengal, the Northwestern Provinces, and Madras, should ever feel that they belong to one Indian nation, is impossible”.
"When Nehru goes," wrote Aldous Huxley, "the government will become a military dictatorship - as in so many of the newly independent states, for the army seems to be the only highly organised centre of power."
The Times of London ran a series of articles entitled "India's disintegrating democracy". The paper's Delhi correspondent, Neville Max well, was certain that "the great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed". Indians, he told his readers, would soon vote in the "fourth - and surely last - general election".
Proud to see India united!
