Regarding Dominique Moisi's Dec. 22 article, "Recognizing confident India as indispensable": "G3" with India? You have got to be kidding! I mean you only have to look at cities like Beijing and Shanghai, or Xian, Chengdu and Dalian. Mumbai and Delhi are simply incomparable to them.
That's just part of the story. Security-wise India cannot do anything about regular terror attacks from Pakistan. Nor can it do much about homegrown insurgencies. Cities are congested, dirty, filled with slums, have little infrastructure and show lack of planning, again unlike China.
India's trade with other countries is a drop in the bucket compared with that of China. Singapore's former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, recently remarked that these two countries are in different leagues. That sums it up well. For a while it will be "G-2" because of inertia, after which China will become the lone superpower.
The world will have to acknowledge the efficacy of China's economic and political models that have delivered and should not be hard-pressed over democracy, which doesn't seem to work in poor countries.
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