Timothy Garton Ash raises an important question (Come on, India! Show us freedom can triumph, 31 January) but poses it badly by exaggerating how free Indians are. Yes, the metropolitan elite can speak and write with reasonable freedom and this is important. And yes, according to the constitution everyone should enjoy these freedoms. But for people who are neither rich nor well-connected this can seem irrelevant.

The reality, certainly in much of central India, is that landlords and employers behave as petty tyrants, confident that the newspapers, which depend on them for advertising, will not report abuses and that the local judiciary, composed of friends and relatives, would protect them in the unlikely event of a sacked employee, evicted smallholder or victim of violence trying to obtain justice. Privatisation is unlikely to tackle these problems as private businessmen and landlords are key culprits. It is true the police often do their bidding, but not quite as reliably as the private armies which larger businesses employ.

As petty tyranny breeds incompetent management and low pay makes for the inefficient use of labour, it seems plausible that it is precisely the lack of freedom and poor human rights which hold back the Indian economy. The question is then why a lack of freedom appears to be less damaging in China.

Margaret Dickinson

London

• Timothy Garton Ash makes several valid points, but also misleads. His comparisons of India and China omit the fact that economic inequality in China greatly exceeds that of India. He appears not to know that the current Indian government, in its first term (2004-09), spent over $57bn on poverty programmes – greatly in excess of any previous government, or of the Chinese. And he is wrong about Indian politicians buying the votes of the poor. Even illiterate voters are too canny to be duped, and they have thrown out the more moneyed parties at state and national elections on a majority of occasions since the late 70s.

Professor James Manor

Institute of Commonwealth Studies

• What a desperate series of excuses Timothy Garton Ash pours out to "explain" why India lags so far behind China in development, with one-third of the per-capita income, terrible poverty etc. Religion, ossifying British bureaucracy, huge diversity etc are hamstrings, he pleads. But China has just as many ethnic groups, had a stultifying imperial bureaucracy and major religious backwardness etc.

The difference is, it tore them all up and started again: it was called a revolution, and established a planned economy or, to be brief, socialism. The decades using major capitalist investment for economic propulsion are not an error, though it has brought its own dangers, not least importing western attitudes and dire consumerism, and weakening the Leninist side of what Garton Ash wants to describe as "Leninist capitalism" (a devious non-Marxist term). But China remains a socialist state, running capitalism as a technical and economic mechanism but only under an overall political state plan. This is far more controlled than the chase-the-short-term-profit laissez-faire of untrammelled capital (euphemistically called "democracy") and gets the results – in just 30 years at that.

The current focus is on pushing investment towards the more undeveloped west side of the country, which is making huge strides in infrastructure and otherdevelopment, to draw living standards towards Shanghai and the rest of the eastern economic zones.

This state control is what has allowed the growth not only to do better than India but surge right past it.

Don Hoskins

Economic & Philosophic Science Review

• Timothy Garton Ash provides a timely reminder of the need for broader-based social development in the subcontinent but stops short of taking India's government to task. The state in India is engaged in a curious strategy of allowing schools, hospitals and other government services to atrophy while dispensing huge sums via populist development programmes. How this strategy will play out is unclear, but in the meantime the poor are taking things into their own hands, and it is interesting that on the day of this article, a huge demonstration against manual scavenging reached its climax in Delhi.

Craig Jeffrey

Oxford