India: A Superpower Without Sidewalks?

ELI5/TLDR

Sadanand Dhume (AEI, WSJ columnist) walks Jim Cardoso through the central paradox of modern India: a country with moon landings, nuclear weapons, and the world’s fourth-largest economy that still can’t lay reliable sidewalks. The interview is built around the idea that India has somehow acquired the trappings of a great power while skipping the boring middle bits — like industrialisation, broad-based prosperity, and decent municipal infrastructure. Dhume’s diagnosis is unsentimental: the rise is real, the gap with China is enormous and widening, and the obstacles are less institutional than attitudinal — insularity and complacency.

The Full Story

The arithmetic of “unlikely”

Dhume frames the entire conversation around a split-screen. On one side, the superpower-coded attributes: a soft landing on the dark side of the moon, declared nuclear status since 1998, a blue-water navy, the world’s largest population since 2023, the fourth-largest economy at market exchange rates with an IMF projection to overtake Japan by 2028. On the other side, the underdeveloped-country attributes: 45% of the workforce still in agriculture (the US figure is 2%) producing only 15% of GDP, per capita GDP of around $2,800 — roughly a fifth of China’s.

The image he keeps returning to — the title of his forthcoming book — is “superpower without sidewalks.” Cities that can’t manage the basic municipal grammar of a pavement are simultaneously launching probes to the moon. The point isn’t to be cute. It’s to flag that the standard development sequence — agriculture, then factories, then services — got scrambled in India’s case. Services jumped the queue and the manufacturing chapter never really happened. Modi pledged in 2015 to lift manufacturing’s share of GDP from 15% to 25%. Ten years later, “the needle has barely budged.”

Two countries, two clocks

The China comparison runs through everything Dhume says, and it’s where the conversation has the most teeth. In 1950, India was ahead of China on most industrial markers — steel, cement, electricity, freight, textile spindles. By 1980, China was ahead. By 1990, per capita income was roughly comparable. By 2026, China’s is nearly five times India’s at market rates. India’s reforms came in 1991, dragged out of the country by a balance-of-payments crisis rather than chosen. China’s came under Deng in the 1980s, chosen with hunger.

“If any Indian politician said ‘to get rich is glorious,’ or ‘it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice,’ or ‘it doesn’t matter if some people get rich first’ at an election rally — they’re not winning an election for dog catcher. Not that you have elections for dog catcher in India. You have elections for everything else but dog catcher.”

That’s the line that does the most work in the whole interview. Dhume’s argument is that Indian electoral politics is structurally engineered against the language of growth. The campaign-trail bidding war, in his telling, is competitive populism: free electricity, then free electricity plus a goat, then free electricity plus a goat plus a TV. He admits he’s making light of it, but the aggregate effect over forty years is the per-capita gap with China.

Insularity and complacency

When Cardoso asks what’s holding India back, Dhume sidesteps the institutions question and goes for attitudes. Two of them. The first is insularity — a closed posture toward learning. He contrasts this with the China of the 1980s, when Deng’s planners were promiscuous about imported expertise: Milton Friedman next to a Hungarian economist, Keynesians next to Austrians, all summoned to explain the strange new beast called a market economy. Dhume doesn’t see that hunger in India.

The second is complacency, which seems to genuinely irritate him. The Indian self-image, he says, runs something like: in 1500 China and India were the world’s two largest economies, that’s the natural order, it’ll be that way again. His response is short — “Just wait a minute. There was something that happened in between.” A few hundred years of things, in fact. The rise of Chinese economies since 1978 happened because someone harnessed science, technology, and markets in a particular way. It didn’t happen because they had a lot of people. The complacency is the assumption that scale alone is destiny.

The China-on-the-doorstep problem

The longest stretch of the interview is on the India-China relationship, and it’s the part where Dhume is most analytically sharp. The border dispute is, in his framing, the stickiest land border problem in Asia — China has formally resolved every other land border, including the long Russian one. The disagreement is over a colonial-era line; from Beijing’s view, it’s a relic of the “century of humiliation” and therefore illegitimate.

The strategic concern is that China is doing to the Himalayas what it has done to the South China Sea — salami slicing. Indian patrols that have happened for decades suddenly find themselves blocked. Defenses go up. Infrastructure goes up. Five years later, the new line is the normal line. Imagine a neighbour who, every few months, moves the fence one foot deeper into your garden — never enough to fight a war over, but always one more foot.

Dhume adds a demographic note that’s worth flagging because it changes how the next thirty years feel. China is already losing people. India will keep growing until around 2060, peaking near 1.7 billion. Over the next three decades, India adds a few hundred million while China loses a few hundred million. From Beijing’s perspective, the relative power gap is at its peak right now — which is itself a destabilising thought, because it gives China a reason to lock things in while the leverage is maximal. China’s other tools: the Pakistan alliance (which Dhume describes through a lovely aside about reading Sino-Pak joint statements as bad love poetry), influence over Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal — what one Indian analyst called China rising over South Asia like a “second sun” — and quietly discouraging Chinese engineers and managers from helping spin up things like Apple’s iPhone supply chain in India.

What success and failure look like

Cardoso closes with a thirty-year forecast question. Dhume’s three markers for success: a globally competitive domestic arms industry (India is currently one of the world’s largest arms importers), solving the jobs crisis (getting people out of subsistence agriculture into productive work), and ameliorating the religion-language-caste schisms that make coherent national action difficult. His version of failure: a bigger economy that still trails the leaders, persistent technological slippage, and a thinning of the liberal elements of democracy — judiciary, press, free institutions — that he says have already weakened over the past decade.

Key Takeaways

The growth puzzle isn’t speed, it’s sequence. India is the only major economy that tried to go from agriculture straight to services. Manufacturing as a share of GDP has been stuck near 15% for a decade despite explicit policy targets. This is the structural reason 45% of the workforce is still on the land producing 15% of output.
The “sidewalks” point is real, not rhetorical. Dhume is making a specific governance argument — Indian cities cannot deliver basic municipal infrastructure (the load-bearing example is sidewalks, but read it as drainage, signage, paving, the boring stuff). It’s not that India can’t do hard things. It’s that the easy things never got institutionalised at the local-government level.
Universal suffrage before universal literacy is the founding bet. Dhume notes that no other country embraced one-person-one-vote at India’s 1947 income level. He thinks India has paid for that — the political class, in his view, is calibrated for a different conversation than economic reform — but he also notes the bet has held: 75 years of mostly uninterrupted democracy with only the 1975-77 Emergency interruption.
The diagnosis is attitudinal, not institutional. This is the most interesting move in the interview. Dhume specifically refuses to point to a single institution as the bottleneck. He goes for two cultural traits: insularity (won’t import expertise the way 1980s China did) and complacency (assumes scale plus history equals destiny).
Salami slicing is the right mental model for the LAC. Not “war or peace” but a slow, continuous redrawing of the line — patrol-route by patrol-route, structure by structure. Once a position is built and held, the new normal is the new normal.
The demographic crossover is a destabilising fact, not a stabilising one. China’s leverage over India is at its peak right now. That’s an argument for Beijing to act sooner rather than later, not later.
Reform timing is doing a lot of work. China started reforming when it was hungry (1978). India started when it was forced (1991, after a balance-of-payments crisis). That four-decade gap, compounded annually, explains most of the current per-capita differential.

Claude’s Take

This is a competent, conventional India-analyst conversation. Dhume is articulate, has the numbers ready, and avoids the two failure modes that usually plague these talks — the chest-thumping triumphalism of a lot of Indian commentary, and the schadenfreude-tinged declinism of a lot of Western coverage. He’s neither pumping nor dunking, which is rarer than it should be.

The genuinely interesting bits are the salami-slicing framing for the China border (a useful mental model), the insularity-vs-complacency diagnosis (because it shifts the conversation away from “fix these five institutions” toward “fix this posture”), and the dog-catcher-electricity-plus-goat line (which is funny and lands).

Where the interview stays in the atmosphere zone is the “what does superpower mean” question. Cardoso never pushes Dhume on whether “superpower” is even a useful target for India, or whether the right question is something different — say, becoming a wealthy middle power with regional weight, which is roughly what Germany, Japan, and Korea have settled for. The whole frame (“unlikely superpower”) is taken as given. There’s also a missed beat on what’s actually different now versus 1991, 2004, or 2014. Modi’s tenure gets one polite question and a measured answer; the harder questions about state capacity, judicial independence, and centralisation that Dhume gestures at in the closing minute don’t get explored.

The sidewalks metaphor is doing more work than the interview formally credits it with. The real insight is that India has built power-projection capacity (military, space, nuclear) faster than it has built municipal capacity. That’s an unusual ordering, and it’s worth more than the thirty seconds it gets. Most countries that have made the developmental jump did the boring thing first.

Score: 7/10. Solid, useful as a frame-setter for someone who wants the standard analyst’s view of India in 2026. Not revelatory if you’ve been reading Dhume’s WSJ column or have already absorbed the China-comparison framework.