This paper suggests that it is in a study of social stratification and mobility, that some answers to the differential nature of the relationship between the state and the people in India and China can be found, and thence in the differential nature of the challenges of governance in the two nations. More specifically, it is in the existence of caste in India and in the absence of caste as a system of social stratification in China , that a crucial element of any explanation of the divergent realities of the two countries lies. Yet, this divergence is never articulated in the journalistic discourse in either country. A lacuna that is all the more egregious given that journalists and pundits of every stripe on both sides of the border and elsewhere in the world, are constantly exhorting the neighbouring nations to look to each other, alternatively as models of success or warnings of disaster.
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