Will India be the next China? As China’s economy spirals downward and optimism about India’s growth reverberates around the world, that question can no longer be dismissed as the fevered fantasy of nationalists. It needs to be taken seriously—not least because the world is already behaving as if India is a major power.
Consider this: In 2023, suspicion swirled that the Indian government was connected to the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil and a plot to kill a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil—a remarkable set of allegations. Yet even more remarkable than the allegations were the reactions. The U.S. government opted to douse the potentially incendiary fallout, saying little, merely allowing the case to wend its way through the courts. In other words, Indian hubris was accommodated, not chastised. It was a testament to India’s newfound political standing.
As for the economy, it is true that the Chinese experience of the last 40 years was a very specific type of miracle that is unlikely to be replicated. Even so, there is a case for India because it is no longer the economically constrained giant that it once was.
For the past quarter century, India’s development was hobbled by its infrastructure, inadequate to the nation’s own manufacturing needs and patently insufficient for foreign firms considering India as an export base. Over the last decade, however, its infrastructure has been transformed. The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has built roads, ports, airports, railways, power, and telecommunications, in such quantities that it has rendered the country almost unrecognizable from what it was just a few years ago. To give just one example, around 34,000 miles of national highways have been built since the current government came to power in 2014.
The nation’s digital infrastructure has also been transformed. Once creaky and technologically backward, it is now cutting-edge, with ordinary Indians using smartphones to pay for even the most routine shopping transactions. Even more crucially, the digital network now serves all Indians, allowing the government to introduce programs such as direct cash transfers to those in need, while the private sector has used it as a platform for entrepreneurship and innovation...
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