why many people predicted that India would not be able to work as a United democratic country
Answers
Explanation:
peaking 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”.
One hundred and twenty-five years after Strachey issued this verdict, I was driving from Patiala to Amritsar, a day’s journey during which I traversed almost the whole breadth of the Indian province of Punjab. Early on, my car was held up by a level crossing. A goods train passed by leisurely, and I read the signs on the wagons - SR, NR, SCR, SER, WR - the “R”standing always for “Railway”, the other letters for the different regional branches of India’s greatest and most genuinely public-service organisation. In the course of their wanderings over the years, the wagons had got all mixed up, so that one which rightfully belonged to the Northern Railway was placed next to one that was the property of the South Central Railway, and so on.
The train passed, and my car started up again. An hour later we came to the town of Khanna. I knew this to be a famous grain mandi, or market, so I sat up and looked at the signs. One especially struck me: "Indian Bank, Khanna Branch. Head Office: Rajaji Salai, Chennai". The Indian Bank was founded in Madras (now Chennai) in the early 20th century by a group of patriotic entrepreneurs. "Rajaji" was the honorific given to C Rajagopalachari, the great Tamil writer and nationalist who became the first Indian to hold the office of governor general.
These two encounters provided an emphatic repudiation of Strachey’s verdict. It was typical that the wagons belonging to different regional branches of Indian Railways had got so messed up; but that there was an Indian Railways to which all those branches owed allegiance signalled a unity amidst the diversity. And that a burly, mutton-eating, whisky-guzzling Sikh farmer in the Punjab would bank his savings in a bank headquartered in Chennai, on a road named for an austere, vegetarian Tamil scholar, was charming beyond words.
The patriot in me warmed to these juxtapositions, but the historian recognised how contingent they were. For India was and is an unnatural nation, a nation that was not supposed to exist, a nation that was never expected to survive. Strachey was merely the first in a long line of British commentators who thought that a united and independent political entity could never successfully be imposed on a land so differentiated by caste, religion, language and region. Winston Churchill, for example, predicted that after the British left the subcontinent, “India will fall back quite rapidly through the centuries into the barbarism and privations of the Middle Ages”. He also thought it likely that “an army of white janissaries, officered if necessary from Germany, will be hired to secure the armed ascendancy of the Hindu”.
Sixty years after independence, Indians