when old housing flats are bulldozed in China, the typical response is some form of compensation for the residents, not bullets or jailing. According to a NYU survey a few years ago, over 99% of all redevelopment projects in China had no state violence whatsoever. Of the remaining incidents, most of the "bullying" came from the aggrieved residents' neighbors, who could not be paid their share of the redevelopment compensation without the entire neighborhood packing their bags and moving together.
Also, the idea that shooting people/being brutal = straight pavements lined with trees is a false assertion. Imposing totalitarianism for the sake of development gets you Pyongyang, not Shanghai or Seoul. The trick is not brutal governance but creating a well-balanced mix of incentives for local politicians to better their constituents' welfare, and then stepping back and empowering your local leaders to be creative.
What Deng Xiaoping realized (from being a political commissar to a corps of peasant guerrillas and later being sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution) was that 95% of the time, the local authorities are the ones who deliver the "goods and services" a government ought to provide. Ergo, when he took power, that was the path he pushed China down - he turned the Organization Department into an engine of evaluating and promoting local officials that did well, the CDIC into an engine that persecuted local officials that did poorly, the various ministries into tools to help local officials accomplish their plans, and the Party Center/Military into a referee of the whole game, to make sure it was played fairly. The rest is history.
What India ought to emulate from China is not one-party rule or a restriction of democracy; it is imposing clear risk/reward mechanisms to shape the behavior of local political leaders while simultaneously lifting restrictions on their behavior. This can be done in the context of a democracy; indeed, it should be nominally easier to accomplish this in a democracy that respects and values diversity rather than a Leninist party-state system that still has strong instincts to centralize power for itself.
What I don't understand is why India, for the past 60 years, has fought all these centrifugal forces head-on, when instead, it ought to be using them to build itself up.