https://www.city-journal.org/narendra-modi-victory
As Western media focus on China’s rise, India remains a geopolitical enigma. While America’s trade wars with Beijing dominate headlines, news outlets relegate India to buried stories of intrigue—a destructive monsoon, a derailed train, a guru in saffron robes with sacred cows.
Why the difference in treatment? Fault may lie with the Jesuits who, beginning in the seventeenth century, evangelized the Chinese instead of the polytheistic Hindus. Modern China also figures prominently in our daily lives. Look at your shoes or your telephone—they probably come from China, not India. India’s economy focuses on its internal market and on exports to poor countries, rather than on trade with the West. Yet India’s population now equals China’s, with its rate of growth projected to surpass the Communist country. And the Indian middle class, with a standard of living comparable with its counterparts in Europe and America, hovers around 200 million people—equivalent in size to the Chinese middle class. India, nonetheless, remains poorer than China, in part because it was late to reform its economy.
In 1979, Chairman Deng Xiaoping renounced collectivism and opened his nation’s economy to market reforms, permitting the Chinese to accumulate personal wealth. It wasn’t until 2004 that India embraced the free market, with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh renouncing the state socialism that dated to the country’s independence in 1949. Under the long reign of India’s Congress Party, which claimed the mantle of Mahatma Gandhi, the country’s economy grew 1 percent annually. Without irony, economists, called this the “Indian rate,” as if it were a cultural sentence.