President Bush arrives in India today on a mission that would have been impossible for his four predecessors who visited before him, Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton. The India that Mr. Bush will encounter has a rapidly growing economy; it is an incipient global economic power; it has demonstrated how, in the midst of what pundits in the West often call a clash of civilizations, a multiethnic society can hew to both secularism and democracy, and under the politically beleaguered but determined leadership of Prime Minister Singh, it has finally sloughed off socialist policies that held it back since independence from the British Raj.

The visit to India comes at a time of the triumph of capitalism over socialism, long the operative ideology in most of the world’s 135 Third World, or developing, countries. It pays homage to the fact that this ancient culture once was among the most robust adherents of the free market – well before Adam Smith invented its modern form. That it veered sharply from homespun capitalism was because of one man, Jawaharlal Nehru, the scion of an aristocratic family who studied at Cambridge University and who eventually came under the influence of Britain’s Fabian socialists and injected an alien ideology into India’s struggle for independence.

Nehru managed, through charisma and oratory, to mesmerize the Indian National Congress, which led the fight against the occupiers of a land that novelist Paul Scott memorably called the “Jewel in the Crown.” And because Nehru was the favored politician of Mohandas Gandhi, the Mahatma, his prescription for a post-independent India’s economic path – socialism – was generally accepted as dogma. But Nehru had a rival, both politically and for the Mahatma’s affections, named Vallabhbhai Patel, the man who, more than anyone, was responsible for lining up India’s 535 maharajahs in support of aligning their territories with secular India, and not theocratic Pakistan, after the Subcontinent was partitioned capriciously by the departing British.

It was Patel who said that India needed to fully open the floodgates of free enterprise in order to sustain economic growth. Under Nehru’s stewardship, and later that of his daughter, the haughty Indira Gandhi – no relation to the Mahatma – India became a case study in bad governance and, even while ostensibly in the non-aligned camp, a fellow traveler of the Soviet Union. The federal bureaucracy mushroomed to more than 10 million (at any given time, no more than 2,500 Britons had administered the vast Subcontinent, which is geographically half the size of continental America). An India that should have become one of the world’s most dynamic economies was instead transformed into a basket case. Vallabhbhai Patel died a broken man, convinced that India would implode on account of Nehru’s errors.

That India did not is because of one man’s determination to resurrect Vallabhbhai Patel’s beliefs. Manmohan Singh was a leftist during his Oxford days. He later headed a socialist think tank in Geneva. But, influenced by one of the greatest figures in New York, Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University’s department of economics, Mr. Singh was converted. Some 15 years ago, as finance minister in an earlier Indian administration, he rolled out reforms to trim the bureaucracy and open up India’s languishing economy to foreign investment. When Mr. Singh became prime minister in 2004, he accelerated those reforms, and they have already yielded results. India’s annual economic growth rate is nearly 7%. Deutschebank says that within three decades India will be behind only America and China in terms of gross domestic product.

This is the context in which Mr. Bush arrives in India. For those of us who covered the great contest between capitalism and communism as to which was the logical ideology to lead the developing countries to prosperity, it is a stunning moment. The fact that Mr. Singh has brought Patel’s free-market beliefs into vogue is testimony to his determination to resist India’s Communists. As head of a 14-party coalition in India’s 535-member parliament, Mr. Singh needs the formal support of the Communists to continue as prime minister. That he has refused to be intimidated into applying the brakes on economic liberalization is testimony to his conviction that socialism was indeed the god that failed.

The vicissitudes of international politics – the nuclear issue, India’s tussle with Pakistan over the mountainous territory of Kashmir, which both countries claim – aren’t going to vanish easily. But two generations ago, western elites were propagating no-growth ideology; there was actually a book published called “Too Many Asians,” on the idea that countries like India would never be able to feed themselves. We have come a long way, and few American politicians have grasped this point as has Mr. Bush, which is why, though the ghosts of Nehru and Indira will be fretting in nirvana, millions of contemporary Indians will welcome him warmly, in the spirit of Vallabhbhai Patel.