India, Oct. 11 -- Once China used an expelled genius scientist from the US to forge ahead in military capability. Now comes India's moment. Can the country's tech-and-political ecosystem seize the day?

In 1955, when Dr Qian Xuesen boarded the SS President Cleveland in Los Angeles bound for Hong Kong, the United States completed one of the most consequential selfinflicted wounds in the history of statecraft. Qian was a Caltech prodigy, a protege of Theodore von Karman, and a co-founder of what became NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1945, as a member of the US Army Air Forces' Scientific Advisory Group, he had travelled to defeated Germany to debrief Wernher von Braun and the Nazi rocket scientists. Yet in 1950, at the height of McCar...