To what degree did India mortgage its industrial future in its protectionist era?
All this for what ? Some anti-colonial revolution ? Nope. India has almost completely ignored everything Indian, if not actively tried to destroy its traditions/languages/cultures and has ran after who ever would care to smooch over its "elite". India is as much a British colony today (if not more) than it ever was.
S.Korea particularity benefitted from the Korean war. USA stepped in and boosted it's economy.
China had a much harder time through the colonial era than India. Remember, China spent decades being traded between warring imperial powers (France vs. Britain, Britain vs. Japan, Japan vs. the Soviets, et cetera). In that process, its institutions were wrecked and cultural memory wreaked havoc with. When all was said and done, they had no equivalent to India's nation-spanning railroad system; systems of law, governance and courts; or (relatively) unified linguistic bloc.
China was subject to colonialism, but not in the same way as India; it was never fully controlled by colonial masters like the British controlled India. There were colonial enclaves and much of humiliation with being forced to hand over areas for trade posts; there were the opium wars and later there was the Japanese expansion and imperialism, but the deep Chinese countryside was always managed by the Chinese for the Chinese.
And there were decades of unrest and civil war. But still, I don't see how China was suffering from colonialism more than India.
They both had their hardest times in their early independence after colonial times. China with civil war, Great Leap Forward, Cultural revolution; India with jumping to the Soviet boat, socialism, planned economy and protectionism.
Korea, on the other hand, has throughout its history been a smaller nation which bigger neighbours try to run over. Sometimes - like in the case of Japan in earlier half of 20th century - it has indeed been completely overrun for decades. So, to survive, it has become fiercely nationalistic. But Korea also definitely faced absolute full scale colonialism, in my opinion in much more depth than India.
Unlike China and Korea, India is not ethnically and culturally cohesive (I know China is a bit more diverse but not to levels of India).
The Economic Reforms started in 1991 soon lost stream by mid-2000s and there we no policy cohesion for reforms
Colonial two step, every Indian will not miss a chance to say how many official languages are there in India, but Indian economy discriminates against non-english languages, esp. in a set up where majority of public education is non-english. The effort of language development outside of Hindi is a state's mission, which itself has two or more official languages outside of English. So, only 20-30% of people who are educated in English medium has the ability to fully participate in the economy etc.
The point is India will straddle along, the West and South will lead the economic growth, where as North and East will drag along, and there is nothing changing in the near future.
Think China and India like the Hare and the Tortoise, China did the miraculous fast run esp. from late 90s to 2012 (when the miracle actually ran out of steam), and India will staddle and move along at 4-7% with ebbs and flows and will catch-up say, in 2050 (its my pure guess).
What drives this divergence?
After Independence and Partition? India never had to deal with war??
The systems we live under are barely different from feudal systems from Europe. Now we just get blamed for all the shit, because you know.. "democracy".
Give someone a toothpick to fight against those wielding guns, and call it even - that is democracy.
Particularly in areas like software contracting.