Poisonous as these attitudes are, they have much more to do with class than politics. They are so obviously part of the vulgarity that accompanies violent social change. If the great drama of our grandparents’ generation was independence, and our parents’ that post-colonial period, ours represents the twilight of the (admittedly flawed) English-speaking classes, and an unraveling of the social and moral order they held in place. A new country is seething with life, but not all vitality is pretty, and there now exists a glaring cultural and intellectual gap between India’s old, entrenched elite and the emerging electorate.

In other places, education would have helped close the gap; it would have helped the country make a whole of the social change it was witnessing. No society is so equitable that men as economically far apart as Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — or as Ed Miliband and David Cameron, for that matter — would have attended the same schools. But, in England and America, there is Oxford and Yale to level the field, to give both men the means to speak to each other.

This is not true of India. In India, one class has had access to the best private schools and foreign universities, where all the instruction is in English; the other has had to make do with the state schools and universities Indian socialism bequeathed them. The two classes almost never meet; they don’t even speak the same language. It has left India divided between an isolated superelite (and if you’re an Indian reading this, you’re probably part of it!) and an emerging middle class that may well lack the intellectual tools needed to channel its vitality.

The prime minister himself — and his background makes Mr. Clinton’s poor Arkansas childhood seem like Greenwich — is a case in point. He’s no fool; his instincts are superb; but his ignorance is startling. Speaking to the journalist Fareed Zakaria last year, before his United States visit, Mr. Modi chose to answer a question, through a translator, on Russia’s annexation of Crimea this way: “There’s a saying in India that the person who should throw a stone first is the person who has not committed any sins.”

There is of course no such saying in India. The prime minister was unknowingly quoting the Bible — John 8:7 — to international audiences, and in the bargain giving President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a clean chit. It was hard to watch, hard not to ask the inevitable question: What else did a man who knew so little not know? And were his limitations not responsible for the most serious of the charges his government now stood accused of: the tinkering reforms, the ham-handed responses to dissent, the inability to control the fringe, the interference with education and, perhaps most damningly, of overlaying a still unchanged Indian reality with a lot of well-intentioned but empty talk?

In another society, with the benefit of a real education, Mr. Modi might have been something more than he was. Then it would be possible to imagine a place with real political differences, and not one in which left and right were divided along the blade of a knife by differences in class, language and education. But just as that other society does not yet exist, neither does that other Modi. Indians will have to make do with the Modi they have; and, as things stand, perhaps the cynics are right: Perhaps this great hope of Indian democracy, with his limited reading and education, is not equal to the enormous task before him.