India has no great potential to realize.
Actually, in terms of geography, population size, access to technology and markets etc, India is not inherently behind China, and started off with significant advantages when they gained independence in many many areas compared to China.
As such, India had the potential to do just as well as China, which makes their actual pitifully achievements all the more pathetic.
India was like a spoilt rich brat, who had almost everything handed to it on a silver platter at birth but who just didn’t want to do any real hard work and just bumbled through its early life living off its inheritance. China OTOH, was like a war orphan with a burnt down house who had to fend for itself but worked tremendously hard to overcome its many massive historical disadvantages.
Now China is successful and the envy of the world with a beautifully developed house (that it is still constantly improving on), massive bank balance and loads of successful businesses.
India is like a high school drop out flipping burgers for a living and resenting China for having ‘stolen its birthright’.
The problem for India is that success requires potential, will and opportunity. While it still has massive untapped potential, even if it could find the will to make painful reforms and commit to the sheer hard graft needed to get things done, it might still no longer be enough.
The world is rapidly advancing and soon the opportunity to turn its massive population into actively contributing labour forces to grow its economy and lift people out of poverty will disappear forever once automation has advanced to the point of being able to replace basic human labour.
And guess who is at the forefront of that new revolution? China, who is uniquely placed at the cutting edge of both AI development and mechanical and electronic design and manufacturing.
I suspect that is another reason why many (better educated) Indians hate China and wish to destroy it. Because China is currently on course to totally snuff out it’s one main hope of making something of its much vaunted population dividend.
If low and medium level manufacturing doesn’t migrate out of a China as it moves up the value chain into high tech and value added areas, then India literally has nothing to look forward to (not that many of the low skilled jobs which might potentially migrate out of China would have ended up in India in any case, as Vietnam offers a far more attractive destination since they are basically copying the Chinese economic and development model exactly).
That adds another layer to their anti-Chinese psyche, as it’s not purely borne out of jealousy, but they also want to ‘inherit’ much of China’s current share of world trade and investment. Hence their desperation to engineer China’s downfall and destruction.
That also goes to the heart of the core problem with modern India. Rather than looking inwards to see how they could improve themselves, they instead always look outwards dreaming of improbable scenarios where riches and success would fall into their laps without themselves having to do any actual hard work.
