Shashi Tharoor is comparing China's "orderly authoritanianism" to India's "choatic democracy". He sees that China, despite its enviable development and growth at "breakneck speed", its people are not "free to choose" their own leaders. Conversely, Indians enjoy free election. So in the end "India’s model may well stand up better in the long run".

It looks as though Indians are obsessed with China and constantly compare it with their country, while China is never fixated on India. It's true that Chinese leaders have the free hand to govern top-down, while Indian leaders can not do what they want, without being "held back" by their own people. The flipside of grassroots democracy is that the bottom-up process moves at a snail's pace.

Tharoor is taking a look at Daniel A. Bell's new book on "The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy" to find out whether it is "a viable model of governance, possibly even superior to the democracy of India and the West". In the world of political sciences, it is easy to divide the world into "good" democracies and "bad" authoritarian regimes. Yet the Chinese political model does not "fit neatly" in either category.

According to Bell, the "one person, one vote" as a way of choosing top leaders may not be optimal, arguing that Chinese-style political meritocracy could help to remedy the key flaws of electoral democracy. Does he have in mind to urge the Indians to examine their devotion to democracy? Tharoor is highly critical of China's ideals of political meritocracy, which set the standard for evaluating "progress or regress" in politics. He also contradicts Bell's perception that China's model be the most important political development of the twenty-first century.

This political meritocracy in China tells us that all its leaders rise through the ranks of the Communist Party. An outsider like will have zero chance to make it to the top, unlike Barack Obama in the US or India's Narendra Modi. Bell is a Confucianist and he argues vigorously for meritocratic governance, saying popular democracies cannot solve our most vexing problems. Our current systems of government may not be perfect. There is both good and bad about them, because lessons can be learned, and mistakes can possibly be avoided. It's unclear how China’s hybrid political regime, with a democratic meritocracy, that is morally desirable and politically stable, be a model for the wider world. So, India's fear that its role as the world's largest democracy will diminish any time soon, is unfounded.