This column serves as a follow-up to my previous article from October 2023 — India’s Economic Journey from Socialism to Self-Reliance. Since its publication, I have received numerous personal responses from readers, with a common theme: India is progressing, but why is it lagging behind China? There are several reasons behind this steadily widening gap. China operates an opaque hybrid system that blends authoritarian communism with elements of reckless capitalism.

 More importantly, China’s policies — both at home and abroad — are driven by national interests. The irony is sharp. India’s Left and pseudo-secular parties often equate nationalism with communalism and consider nationalism a cuss word — blindly opposing everything that is in the national interest. For China, values like regional autonomy, religious freedom, human rights, environmental protection, and individual liberty are all subordinate, used only insofar as they support broader national objectives. Any attempt to exploit these values to undermine national progress or to elevate one’s own political or global profile is put down with a heavy hand.

The system is accountable to none. In 1985, the GDP per capita for China and India was almost the same, at $293. The gap between the two has since been widening. At that time, Deng Xiaoping was the country’s top leader, succeeded by Jiang Zemin, who led from 1989 to 2002, followed by Hu Jintao from 2002 to 2012.

For the last 13 years, Xi Jinping has been in power, maintaining a strong hold and showing no signs of stepping down anytime soon. China has had four leaders in four decades, in complete command of their country.

In contrast, during the last 40 years, India saw as many as nine Prime Ministers, many of them with truncated terms. Only four — Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Narendra Modi — had meaningful tenures. V P  Singh, Chandra Shekhar, H D Deva Gowda and

I K Gujral ran lame-duck governments, only strategising on how to survive in office.

Dr Manmohan Singh’s ten years........

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