Do you think India and democracy are a fit for each other?
I'd like to know your thoughts on it.
Yes and No.
To my very inaccurate knowledge of India's history and current development, I don't think being a democratic society or not has
too much to do with India's progress.
India's biggest hurdle of development is not rooted in any system, but rather in cultural identity. The layers of your social structure have never been touched, your elites stays elites and underprivillieged stays underprvillieged, be it independence or openning up, no major movement in social life have ever shaked the core of the status quo in your political configuration.
It is unfair to say that india has never been changed since British installed a governor to rule the subcontinent, but statement holds true in many aspects, putting shri into office actually does not mean anything vital.
With that being said, I think a paradigm shift in culture should be put into your schedule among the top list items, other lesser important issues such as choice of instruments to realize this goal (Be it democracy or China style soft authoritarian) will follow up automatically once objectives are set.
From an outsider's view, you have to strengthen your second sector in a big scale. Forget about the world office's pink dream, reinforce your infrastructure and industrialize your country. industrilization will bring you a population with self consciousness, discipline. and REAL sense of social equality. Only when you have this kind of people can you emancipate your rurual population, your women, and your lower castes, can you make them citizen instead of "surplus of active Indians"( I came to an article by one of your scholars who claimed there are only 100 million Indian are actually Indian, with this kind of mentality in your elite class, how can your society progress?)
WIth China restructuring its industry, there are enormous chances india can uitlize, even some are labor intensive manufactures, you should just take them and implant them. and with Japan aging out, Indian can also take over some of their sectors, don't look down upon these dirty jobs, Japanese did that, Korean did that, I see no reason why Idian is too proud of doing them.
Short thoughts short, it really does not matter being democratic or not, it matters if you want to break up your old cultural identity with industrialization and build up a brand new one.