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MUMBAI, INDIA, April 23, 2009: It may be hard to credit now, as 700 million voters go to the polls in the world’s biggest elections, but back in the 1940s the wise men of the British Raj predicted that while Pakistan would prosper, India would soon be divided into smaller mutually hostile states. Pakistan, it was thought, would become a vibrant Muslim state, a bulwark against Soviet communism. India’s predominantly Hindu population, however, was presumed to be a source of weakness and instability.
Nobody expressed this view more forcefully than Lieutenant-General Sir Francis Tucker who, as General Officer Commanding of the British Indian Eastern Command, had been in charge of large parts of the country. His memoirs, While Memory Serves, published in 1950, the year India became a republic, reflected the view of many of the departing British: “Hindu India was entering its most difficult phase of its whole existence. Its religion, which is to a great extent superstition and formalism, is breaking down. We may well expect, in the material world of today, that a material philosophy such as Communism will fill the void left by the Hindu religion.”