Can India ever match China ? TSI analyses why the dragon always outperforms the tiger

Let us start with a fact that most Indians are either unaware of, or prefer to ignore since our sense of history is as strong as our performance at the Olympic Games. Professor Emeritus of London School of Economics Meghnad Desai has written a new book called The Rediscovery of India. Right at the beginning, this is how Desai tries to put the India-China comparison in perspective in his own words: “ India, unlike China, was never a unitary or even a single federal state through much of its history. In his fascinating one volume history of India, John Keay has a diagram showing how much of India’s territory was controlled , over the last three millennia, by any ruling dynasty. The contrast with China is striking. For China, once you leave a turbulent period during 300-200 BC, there is a continuity in state formation. For India, the reverse is true. After the Maurya period of 400-300 BC, you have to fast forward (almost 2,000 years) to the Mughal rule which controlled a similar percentage of territory…India is at once a young polity and a very old culture.”