India saw a similar issue in the 1970-80s with the rise of the far-left Naxal movement and the far-right Hindutva movement, and the political strife in addition to the collapse of the USSR caused led a country that was contemporaneously comparable to China in the 1980s-90s falling 15 years behind China by the 2010s.

Entire generations of scholar-students ended up joining political movements, student politics degraded campus safety and cohesion, and society politicized to such a degree that state capacity degraded severely, and made most voters to view Singaporean and Malaysian (authoritarian) style "Asian Democracy" to be as a viable option. Heck, LKY, Goh Chok Tong, and other Singaporean policymakers mentored Narendra Modi back when he was CM of Gujarat.

A similar transition is slowly happening in the US as well.

> A similar transition is slowly happening in the US as well.

It was in the 60s, but they killed that off pretty solid.

Having lived in China for an extended period (most of two decades) and traveled India for months, I think a "15 years behind" narrative is highly misconstrued, even at that point. I first visited China in '98 and India in 2000. India was laying its first fiber optics in New Delhi, while China was kicking out European suppliers after having mastered its own cellular equipment, cloned Cisco and began to broadcast free to air IP protocol suite TV documentaries to 1.4 billion people. By the 2010s China had hosted the Olympics and had a space station and a viable navigation satellite constellation, a high speed rail network, an aircraft carrier and was advancing domestic airline production. India was then and is now permanently behind China with a completely disparate and arguably negative trajectory: there's no viable temporal offset narrative. In my view the biggest issues in India are treatment of women, the caste system, corruption and poverty.