Modern Britain, modern India and the Welfare State

I highly recommend Andrew Marr's 'A History of Modern Britain', which I'm reading now. Marr covers politics very well, but ventures dutifully in every chapter into how life was for ordinary Britons: entertainment, clothing, holidaying, the movie and theatre industries and, well, the economy.

The book gathers steam with the general election of 1945 right after the end of World War II, with the defeat of Churchill's Conservatives and the election of Britain's Labour Government of 1945-50. Reading about this Government is a revelation: its vision and policies were strikingly similar to those the Nehru government of 1947-52 adopted. From the Wikipedia page for Labour:

Clement Attlee's proved one of the most radical British governments of the 20th century, presiding over a policy of nationalising major industries and utilities including the Bank of England, coal mining, the steel industry, electricity, gas, telephones and inland transport including railways, road haulage and canals. It developed and implemented the "cradle to grave" welfare state conceived by the economist William Beveridge. To this day the party considers the 1948 creation of Britain's publicly funded National Health Service under health minister Aneurin Bevan its proudest achievement.

For a conservative, this reads like a nightmare. But both Labour and Congress set their countries on the path of being governed by a Welfare State. Things worsened for both countries over the next three decades, into the seventies.

Yet Britain reacted differently from India, finally throwing its arms up and voting in Thatcher in '79, with a mandate to liberalize the economy and dismantle most of the mammoth welfare state. In India, around the same time in '77, the Congress was voted out of office too, for economic incompetence as much as for the Emergency. Yet the Janata government fumbled the ball. And even when the country did begin liberalization in '91, reform had to be (and continues to be) sneaked through.

What was it about Britons that they demanded - and got - change at the end of the '70s? What is it about Indians that not only do they seem content with clearly the sub-optimal state of affairs across sectors, but actually quote with pride from reports estimating India's GDP 'overtaking' Japan and the U.S. in some distant future.