And Vietnam isn't that much better than India (I travel to both 3-4 times a year because of family).
If you're in D1 or D3 of HCMC maybe, but that's not where the majority of Saigon residents live - they mostly live in D10, D8, or D4 which don't look much different from similar neighborhoods in most of Urban India.
And once you go to rural Vietnam, I've noticed the quality of life is worse than those in the villages my extended family lives in back in India, because most spending is basically given to a handful of cities.
My wife's ancestral village in VN has dirt roads, a single primary school, and no doctor, and social services such as direct welfare transfers are nonexistent. On the other hand, my ancestral village in North India has a wind turbine factory, an electric battery factory, and farmers and residents get around $50-150/mo in direct benefits transfer.
A "China" or "South Korea" model doesn't make sense for a democracy like India (or even Indonesia or Phillipines, which share similar issues). A "Turkiye" or "Israel" model makes more sense for these kinds of countries.
The TLDR is competent dictatorship and normalization (really cooperation) with hegemon (US) made rapid export led growth work. The dictator sets up the industries, the hegemon consumes the outputs. Need both, transition away from authoritarian is optional though (especially resource exporters that hegemon needs).
Democracies to my knowledge has been incapable of bootstrapping the 0-1 agrarian -> industrial development fast. I can't really think of one that didn't industrialize from exploitation/colonial phase prior to democratizing.
India hindered by being "real" democracy with universal sufferage at the outset while being very multicultural. It's... very helpful for development to culturally genocide society into relative monoculture. You want that migrant country girl from Z village to be fungible cog in factory Y, and you start that by making sure everyone can interact with language Z.
