India may yet win the struggle for economic supremacy in the East

With the sixtieth anniversary of independence, enthusiasm for India in the West is at an all-time high. And though the Hindu nationalist slogan “India Shining” was decisively and derisively dismissed as overoptimistic in India itself at the 2004 general election, among Western commentators the sub-continent’s sparkle remains untarnished. India seems to be the nation of the future – a vibrant, democratic, multicultural and increasingly free-market alternative to the grimly uniform authoritarianism of China. India seems finally to have fulfilled the dream of its chief architect, Nehru, who predicted that, once freed from the British Raj, the new nation would become a free, democratic and developed state – the global embodiment of “the spirit of the age”.