Shekhar Gupta: India, we have a problem

Brand India - and Brand Modi - has been damaged by a combination of identity politics and economic decline. But the world isn't writing India off, not yet

Is the world always conspiring to pull India down? Are the big powers, especially in the democratic West, fearful of India’s rise? Is there, to use a term fashionable among the faithful lately, a Christo-Islamic plot against the rise of a Hindu India? Does the rest of the world hold India and other countries, say, China, to different standards?

All of the above are untrue, except the last and for that there is a reason: The size and dynamism of China’s economy. The truth is, for seven decades now, almost all of the rest of the world, has wanted India to