> First, analysts have been wrong about India’s rise in the past. > Second, despite India’s extraordinary growth over the past two years—when India joined

> First, analysts have been wrong about India’s rise in the past. > Second, despite India’s extraordinary growth over the past two years—when India joined the club of the world’s five largest economies—India’s economy has remained much smaller than China’s. > Third, India has been falling behind in the race to develop science and technology to power economic growth. > Fourth, when assessing a nation’s power, what matters more than the number of its citizens is the quality of its workforce. > But as Lee Kuan Yew explained in a series of interviews published in 2014, the year before his death, he reluctantly concluded that this was not likely to happen. In his analysis, the combination of India’s deep-rooted caste system that was an enemy of meritocracy, its massive bureaucracy, and its elites’ unwillingness to address the competing claims of its multiple ethnic and religious groups led him to conclude that it would never be more than “the county of the future”—with that future never arriving. Thus, when I asked him a decade ago specifically whether India could become the next China, he answered directly: “Do not talk about India and China in the same breath.”