He’s talking about the fact that India’s ruling class for a long time has been western-educated and rejected the people’s populist instincts: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial...

> Nehru and Jinnah led India and Pakistan to independence as the brown-skinned Westerners Thomas Macaulay had envisioned a century earlier. South Asian in appearance and pedigree, the leaders of these two nations nevertheless personified a fundamental truth about the Western orientation of the new Asian states.

We had the same in Bangladesh. Westernized university-educated people like my dad trying to impose secular democracy on a deeply Muslim country. Didn’t last.