India has 120 estimated nuke warheads.
India also has a per capita income of 2000 usd while China has around 10k .
Also lots of fancy cities in china and massive dams.
Who has more to lose ? India or China.
After the first few nuclear missiles hitting china , the communist government will be pleading for peace.
The point is the nuclear weapons should not be for adornment. They should form a central part of Indian defence.
Actually, india would have far more to lose. It would not be even close.
The scale of destruction visited on German and Japanese cities during WWII by British and America. Conventional bombing shows 120 or so low to medium yield nuclear warheads used in a counter value attack would visit on a country like China, or for that matter, india, today can hampered their war efforts to various degrees, but it neither broke their ability, nor their willingness, to continue to fight effectively.
Not war winning, but the impact will be very different because the two countries will weather the exchange very differently.
Instrumental to how well each country could weather such an exchange would be the effectiveness of their prewar planning for, and execution upon war warning of, the evacuation of population and industry, the effectiveness of their respective civil defenses during the nuclear exchange, the effectiveness of post attack relief efforts, as well as the effectiveness of post attack industrial reorganization required to minimize the effect of the attack the ability of each country to continue to pursue the war, and to rebuilt after the end of the war.
There is no doubt in each one of these category, China will massively outperform india.
In dollar terms, the initial material damage to China would likely to higher. But it is almost 100% certain that post attack, Chinese central control would be stronger, infrastructure and industry would be reorganized better, re-housing of people made homeless by the attack done much more quickly, allocation of food and services using damaged infrastructure done much more efficiently and effectively, efforts to deal with nuclear fall out more effective, epidemic disease control far more effective, rebuilding commenced sooner and done much more efficiently. in other words, india will be impacted much much more severely by less physical damage up front, with the effects lasting much much longer, than would eb the case for China under same scale of nuclear counter value attack.