Right for a while around the mid '70s she effectively dismantled democracy in India, and rejected Western criticism. "Just a few years ago," she observed, "there was a euphoria in the West about China and China is an authoritarian country."
Thing is, a lot of the hoopla around China at that time was based on the idea that they WEREN'T authoritarian: naive ideologues in the West really believed that the Red Guards were a spontaneous uprising, and that the youth were running the country.
Which at a superficial glance, might have seemed plausible, if you compared the China of the Cultural Revolution to that of the Soviet-style bureaucrats of the fifties and early 60s, or better yet, to the Confucian patriarchs of earlier eras. However, with India, western observers would most likely be comparing the Emergency to the three previous decades as "the largest democracy in the world". By which standard(however idealized it may have been), Mrs. Gandhi's authoritarianism is gonna suffer by comparison.
Not that I would want to overstate the extent to which discussion of India was a major part of peoples' conversational repertoire in the mid-1970s. In comparison to the USSR or China, it really wasn't on the radar, pro or con.