I beg to differ.
India is a country where people routinely, and horribly, maim their children so they can be better beggars, where families live on sidewalks, where people don't have enough money to buy firewood so the dead are thrown into the Ganges half burnt, where people still practice female infanticide because girls are a liability to the family (obliged to give huge dowry when they get married), where the cast system is still alive and well, etc, etc.
An interesting movie to watch is Shocking Asia, a German documentary (not a recent production, however time is moving in a snail's pace in a few Asian countries).
"While India's growth makes it an economic and political player to watch in the next decades, the country remains desperately poor. Almost a quarter of India's 1.1 billion people live on less than $1 a day; 700 million more live on less than $2 a day.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/08/opinion/edhughes.php"
"According to the 1996 Human Development Report, 53 per cent of Indian children under five were underweight. 67 per cent of Indian births were unattended by health personnel. 64 per cent of Indian women were illiterate. Average these to get our Capability Poverty Measure (CPM): 61.5. That made us 89th among 101 developing countries the HDR ranked that year by their CPM."
"Income Levels and Poverty:
With over a quarter of the world's poor concentrated in India, poverty is the government's biggest priority.
Classified as a "low income" country by the World Bank with a GNI (gross national income) of $450.
Great inequality in the distribution of wealth: the richest tenth of households hold 33% of wealth, while the poorest tenth only hold 3%
29% of the population lives below the poverty line; 70% of these people reside in rural areas
86% of the population lives under $2 per day; 44% lives under $1 per day
25% of the population does not have enough money to eat adequately"
"Trafficking in persons:
current situation: India is a source, destination, and transit country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of forced or bonded labor and commercial sexual exploitation; the large population of men, women, and children - numbering in the millions - in debt bondage face involuntary servitude in brick kilns, rice mills, and embroidery factories, while some children endure involuntary servitude as domestic servants; internal trafficking of women and girls for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced marriage also occurs; the government estimates that 90 percent of India's sex trafficking is internal; India is also a destination for women and girls from Nepal and Bangladesh trafficked for the purpose of commercial sexual exploitation; boys from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are trafficked through India to the Gulf states for involuntary servitude as child camel jockeys"
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html
"Focus (1): India
As John-Thor Dahlburg points out, "in rural India, the centuries-old practice of female infanticide can still be considered a wise course of action." (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'," The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.]) According to census statistics, "From 972 females for every 1,000 males in 1901 ... the gender imbalance has tilted to 929 females per 1,000 males. ... In the nearly 300 poor hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu [state], as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances [in 1993] ... Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death."
"A study of Tamil Nadu by the Community Service Guild of Madras similarly found that "female infanticide is rampant" in the state, though only among
Hindu (rather than Moslem or Christian) families. "Of the 1,250 families covered by the study, 740 had only one girl child and 249 agreed directly that they had done away with the unwanted girl child. More than 213 of the families had more than one male child whereas half the respondents had only one daughter." (Malavika Karlekar, "The girl child in India: does she have any rights?," Canadian Woman Studies, March 1995.) "
http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html
So you are either purposely misrepresent the facts to protect the image of India (not the first time somebody from a third world country would do that even if you live in the US; if you were born in America you would have little reason to distort the truth unless India is more important to you than the US) or sadly misinformed.
Which one?
Regarding the religion issue, I wonder if the Indian Parliament would allow Christians to worship in the Indian House of Commons?
Alex