“A billion people, in a functioning democracy. Ain’t that something.” George W. Bush’s awestruck musings on the wonders of Indian democracy will be echoed all around the world this week.

Despite a sharp economic slowdown and a series of destabilising terrorist attacks, India’s 420m voters have just calmly voted the Congress party back into government, with a much increased majority.

In western capitals, admiration for the maturity of Indian democracy will be mixed with relief. There were fears that a government led by the rightwing BJP would take a more confrontational line with Pakistan – widening the conflict in south Asia in new and dangerous ways. Investors also seem to be impressed. The stock market shot up 17 per cent in the wake of Congress’s victory.

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Why do countries suddenly start producing great novelists? When I was in Russia recently a friend complained to me that the transition to capitalism had killed Russian literature – under communism they had had Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Bulgakov. But modern Russians, my friend lamented, seem to be too busy consuming to read or produce great literature.

In India, however, an economic boom has gone hand in hand with a literary boom. Once again a novel by an Indian-born writer has carried off Britain’s leading prize for fiction. Last night Aravind Adiga won the Booker Prize with his first novel – “The White Tiger”. He follows in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie (1981), Arundhati Roy (1997) and Kiran Desai (2006). (And lots of people think that Vikram Seth should also have won with “A Suitable Boy” in 1993.) In the 1970s, a couple of novels about India – written by British authors (Paul Scott and Ruth Prawher Jhabvala) – won the Booker. But now Indian authors are regularly winning the prize in their own right.

Perhaps that is because, there are truly historic social and economic changes underway in India? Critics have described Adiga’s novel as Dickensian – and modern Indian cities do feel like something out of Dickens – seething with people, and with the middle-class and the economic under-class jostling up against each other.

The White Tiger – which I haven’t yet read – takes the form of letters written from a Bangalore businessman, Balram Halwai, to Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister. Halwai writes: “Out of respect for the love of liberty shown by the Chinese people, and also in the belief that the future of the world  lies with the yellow man and the brown man now that our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man has wasted himself through buggery, mobile phone usage, and drug abuse, I offer to tell you, free of charge, the truth about Bangalore.”

This sounds like a book I should definitely read. I was in Bangalore recently – but only got to see the GE and Infosys offices and the Taj hotel. I’m not sure that qualifies as “the truth”.