Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has recently returned to government in India without the outright majority that Modi and the BJP were expecting.

Shortly before this election, an article in Nikkei Asia argued, in some detail, that “India’s economy can overtake China’s if it can stay on track”. Not long afterward, Fortune magazine ran another woe-is-China story claiming that China’s economy is headed for a “dead-end,” which supported pessimistic China forecasts strikingly evident in the Nikkei article.

The Nikkei story is not all fulsome optimism about India — concerns are noted. Yet it still boldly concludes that “India seems set to have an economy as large as that of China around the middle of the century, as well as a much larger population”.

So, India looks set to equal the size of the Chinese economy within 30 years. One way to investigate the credibility of this forecast is to consider a range of factors not addressed in the Nikkei article.

According to Statista, the adult literacy rate in China exceeded 97 percent by 2020. In 2022, Macrotrends said the literacy rate in India was over 20 percent lower, at 76.32 percent. Twenty-two languages are spoken (and written) in India, with around 44 percent of the population speaking Hindi. There are many subsidiary dialects spoken in China, but over 900 million (more than 64 percent) speak standard Chinese (Putonghua/Mandarin) as their first language, with most in China being able to understand this standard form. Standard Chinese is also widely spoken across the global Chinese diaspora of around 50 million and in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. More importantly, China has retained a standard, single written language for millennia, the modernized version of which is still uniformly used and understood across all of China (as well as globally).

Religion is intensely significant in India — and notably diversified. Around 80 percent of the population identifies as Hindu, while approximately 220 million follow Islam, with smaller numbers following Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism and Jainism. The Washington Post, in 2023, highlighted how the BJP has regularly sought political advantage by “inflaming hatred of Muslims in India”. The BJP relationship with Sikhism is also actively antagonistic, according to regular media reports.

Next, according to CNN, about 60 percent of India’s population lived on less than $3.10 per day (the World Bank’s median poverty line) in 2017. Fortunately, this figure has since been significantly reduced. However, Statista said that by 2021, 16.4 percent of the Indian population were still reported as being multidimensionally poor (down from over 55 percent living in acute poverty in 2016). Over the four years from 2017 to 2020, Statista also reported that the total percentage of the population living below the acute poverty line in China had shrunk from 3.1 percent to 0.6 percent and then to zero.

The Economist, Britain’s leading international weekly, typically loses little time in highlighting any and every weakness seen (and at times imagined) related to the rise of China. But it also can be candidly positive when facts are incontrovertible. Most recently, it ran a series of forceful reports under the headline that China has become a “scientific superpower”. In May, the Economist argued that “Chinese EV-makers are leaving Western rivals in the dust”.

Many other reports have highlighted China’s remarkable scientific advancement and its growing, world-leading performance in, for example, green-tech developments of all kinds (including power generation), advanced communications, high-speed rail, shipbuilding, advanced urban development, and vehicle manufacturing. This hardly looks like a “dead end”: Most countries would be openly pleased to be heading in the same direction.

Meanwhile, Australia’s leading (and longest-running) TV current-affairs program, Four Corners, has just broadcast an extended investigation into the alleged, malign global activities of the Indian security services, titled “Infiltrating Australia”.

In 2021, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) reported that a “nest of spies” from a foreign country had been discovered in Australia, adding that “the spies developed targeted relationships with current and former politicians, a foreign embassy and a state police service”.

At the time, the foreign country was not named, and many speculated, not least in the media, that it must be China. The Four Corners program has firmly confirmed, however, that ASIO had discovered that a nest of Indian government spies was active in Australia. These “diplomat spies” were then expelled. This was done quietly, given that Australia and India, along with the United States and Japan, are members of the China-containing Quad alliance. Notwithstanding this threatening team of Indian spies, the program highlighted how Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and  Indian Prime Minister Modi still engaged in much hugging and mutual admiration during Modi’s subsequent official visit to Australia in 2023.

Four Corners also detailed officially made cases, covered by a range of mainstream media outlets, that the Indian security services were allegedly involved in the assassination of a Canadian-Sikh nationalist in Vancouver in 2023 and the planned assassination — conceived in 2023 — of another American-Sikh nationalist in New York. It has just been announced that this alleged “murder-for-hire” assassin (an Indian national) was recently extradited to the US from the Czech Republic.

China faces a raft of developmental problems, which it is tackling through complex, experience-based planning and immense, consistent application, which is evident across all of China. Its extraordinary track record cannot, of course, guarantee uniform future success. But the positive foundations laid have broken fresh ground in world history. In the Economist article on China’s scientific revolution, Professor Simon Marginson of Oxford University concluded: “It’d be very unwise to call limits on the Chinese miracle because it has had no limits up until now.”

Without question, India’s rise (just like China’s) is, broadly understood, exceptionally good for the world — and, of course, especially beneficial for India. Everyone should applaud it. It is clear, however, that India remains far behind China in terms of overall economic development. According to the Statistics Times, in 2024, China will retain an economy that is 4.7 times larger than India’s based on raw GDP data and 2.4 times larger based on purchasing power parity figures.

Moreover, India faces a significantly amplified range of deep legacy challenges related to literacy, poverty and major religious and ethnic divisions, compared to China, compounded by the continuing impact of the extensive, embedded caste system. Plus, India remains locked in a grim multidecade, now nuclear-tipped, dispute with Pakistan, made worse by the linked, deadly internal quarrel centered on Kashmir.

Of course, India’s population is still growing, while China’s has begun to shrink, raising certain real concerns. Some estimates suggest that India may continue growing toward 1.7 billion, which would mean an increase beyond today of 300 million more people to feed, house and educate — the equivalent of adding almost another US to India’s substantial existing population.

In addition to these formidable challenges, India appears to be adding profound geopolitical complexity to its future planning by using reckless, deadly-if-necessary measures to prosecute its internal political disputes within the offshore Indian diaspora.

Is India “set to have an economy as large as China’s around the middle of the century”? All things are possible. However, a more-balanced squaring of the current comparative ledger reveals how this expectation is visibly overstated.

The author is an adjunct professor at the Faculty of Law, the University of Hong Kong.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.