Lajpat Nagar, where incomes and aspirations are outpacing civic amenities and where real-estate values are signalling its possible upgrade to a higher class of lebensraum, may already have many Indians who don’t vote. But do they and the millions in other Indian cities represent a fundamental, systemic challenge to India’s parliamentary democracy, as Jaffrelot argues? One can argue that if politics is shaped by the votes of the “plebeians” and policy still has inputs drawn from the middle-class weltanschauung, then imperfect as it is, the system serves a country where a lot of people are getting wealthier but which also has a lot of poor citizens. Indeed, India’s democracy may be the reason why the economic paradigm shift since the early 1990s hasn’t engendered acute class tension. And the real scandal in Indian democracy is not so much that the rich don’t vote but that the governments poor voters elect let them down so badly, by consistently designing bad welfare policies. If there’s any concern about India’s political system that has been remarkably resilient so far, it arises from government delivery failure. But at least one bunch of non-performers can be thrown out every five years.

They can’t do that in China, where by all accounts social tension is on the rise. Can China’s GDP shape its politics to such an extent that even a rudimentary form of democracy becomes an academic point, especially since the share of mass consumption in China’s GDP is remarkably low, compared with both India’s and the West’s?

... contd.