And not in a good way.

CHINA IS shakily authoritarian while India is a stable democracy—indeed, the world’s largest. So goes the cliché, and it is true, up to a point. But there is a growing resemblance between the two countries. A decade after we were told that China and India were “flattening” the world, expediting a historically inevitable shift of power from West to East, their political institutions and original nation-building ideologies face a profound crisis of legitimacy. Both countries, encumbered with dynastic elites and crony capitalists, are struggling to persuasively reaffirm their founding commitments to mass welfare. Protests against corruption and widening inequality rage across their vast territories, while their economies slow dramatically.

If anything, public anger against India’s political class appears more intense, and disaffection there assumes more militant forms, as in the civil war in the center of the country, where indigenous, Maoist militants in commodities-rich forests are battling security forces. India, where political dynasties have been the rule for decades, also has many more “princelings” than China—nearly 30 percent of the members of parliament come from political families. As the country intensifies its crackdown on intellectual dissent and falls behind on global health goals, it is mimicking China’s authoritarian tendencies and corruption without making comparable strides in relieving the hardships faced by its citizens. The “New India” risks becoming an ersatz China.

TO THOSE IN THE WEST who reflexively counterpose India to China, or yoke them together, equally tritely, as “rising” powers, the solutions to their internal crises seem very clear: Democratic India needs more economic reforms—in other words, greater openness to foreign capital. Meanwhile, authoritarian China, now endowed with a cyber-empowered and increasingly assertive middle class, must expose its anachronistic political system to the fresh air of democracy.

Such abundant commonplaces draw upon the Whiggish assumption shared by most Western commentary: that middle and other aspiring classes created by industrial capitalism bring about accountable government. This was the main axiom of “Modernization Theory,” first proposed by American cold warriors as a gradualist alternative to communist-style revolution. The theory always had its critics, most notably Samuel Huntington, who questioned whether social and economic transformation in developing societies is always benign or leads to democracy. Certainly, Modernization Theory never took into account the possibility that certain forms of raw capitalism violate the basic principles of democracy in a country like India.

It is often forgotten that the ruling elites of both India and China once presented themselves as socioeconomic engineers working hard to release their desperate masses from the curses of poverty, ill health, and illiteracy. Despite investments in institutions of higher learning—which would later help provide highly skilled labor to Western banks and tech companies—India was always a straggler in public health, left behind not just by China but also by Sri Lanka (and now Bangladesh). This was largely due to what Amartya Sen, writing in 1982, called “an astonishingly conservative approach to social services.” The limits of Indian democracy had been outlined early by the co-author of India’s constitution, B.R. Ambedkar, who famously lamented in 1950 that “democracy in India is only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” Thirty years later, Sen was still warning that it was “important to understand the elitist nature of India to make sense of India’s policies.”