Grand Tamasha - SoundSage

“Looking Back at U.S.-India Relations in the Biden Era (with Ashley J. Tellis),” Grand Tamasha, September 11, 2024.
“EAM Jaishankar on India's Pluralism, Jammu and Kashmir, and Globalization,” Grand Tamasha, October 1, 2019.

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Rahul Bhatia, “The trials of an Indian witness: how a Muslim man was caught in a legal nightmare,” The Guardian, March 2, 2023.
Rahul Bhatia, “How India’s Welfare Revolution Is Starving Citizens,” The New Yorker, May 16, 2018.
Rahul Bhatia, “The Year of Love Jihad in India,” The New Yorker, December 31, 2017.
Rahul Bhatia, “India Loves Data but Fails to Protect It,” New York Times, April 3, 2018.
“Governing India's Digital Revolution (with Rahul Matthan),” Grand Tamasha, January 24, 2024.

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Suhas Palshikar, Sandeep Shastri, and Sanjay Kumar, “CSDS-Lokniti 2024 pre-poll survey: There is no clear and close challenger to the BJP this time. ‘Ifs and buts’ apply,” Hindu, April 13, 2024.
Sandeep Shastri, Sanjay Kumar, and Suhas Palshikar, “CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey: A return to an era of genuine coalitions,” Hindu, June 6, 2024.
Lokniti Team, “Post-poll survey: Methodology,” Hindu, June 6, 2024.
Sandeep Shastri, “CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey: Modi factor seems to have stagnated over a decade,” Hindu, June 6, 2024.
Sanjay Kumar and Fuhaar Bandhu, “CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey: BJP maintains advantage among young voters,” June 7, 2024.
Lokniti Team, “CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey: Clearing misconceptions about the post-poll survey,” Hindu, June 9, 2024.
“Decoding the 2024 Indian General Elections (with Sunetra Choudhury and Rahul Verma),” Grand Tamasha, June 6, 2024.
“Why India’s Modi Underperformed (with Ravi Agrawal, Yamini Aiyar, and Milan Vaishnav),” FP Live, June 7, 2024.
“India's 2024 Election—and its Aftermath (with Sadanand Dhume and Tanvi Madan),” Grand Tamasha, June 19, 2024.

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Ashley J. Tellis, “Inevitable Fractures: The Ukraine War and the Global System,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 13, 2024.
Ashley J. Tellis, “Completing the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement: Fulfilling the Promises of a Summer Long Past,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 27, 2023.
“Reexamining America’s Bet on India (with Ashley J. Tellis),” Grand Tamasha, June 21, 2023.
Ashley J. Tellis, “America’s Bad Bet on India,” Foreign Affairs, May 1, 2023.
Ashley J. Tellis, Bibek Debroy, and C. Raja Mohan, Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power (New Delhi: Penguin, 2022).

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Sadanand Dhume, “India’s Election Humbles Narendra Modi,” Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2024.
Sadanand Dhume, “India Could Become Venezuela on the Ganges,” Wall Street Journal, May 22.
“India's Modi Looks to Retain Power (with Tanvi Madan),” Bloomberg Daybreak Asia (podcast), June 5, 2024.
“Two years into the Biden administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy: A conversation with Assistant Secretary Daniel Kritenbrink,” Brookings Institution, May 14, 2024.
“Decoding the 2024 Indian General Elections (with Sunetra Choudhury and Rahul Verma),” Grand Tamasha, June 6, 2024.

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“Political Earthquakes: Key 2024 Elections in Emerging Markets and What it Means for Growth and Reforms,” Natixis, June 4, 2024.
Trinh Nguyen, Kelly Wang, and Diana Zhao, “Lower current account deficit shields India from external shocks and future success hinges on sustaining it,” Natixis, May 29, 2024.
Trinh Nyugen and Kelly Wang, “Modi Drove Growth with Public Investment, Supported by Higher Fiscal Revenue; Foreign Inflows Should Help with Funding Pressure,” Natixis, April 12, 2024.
Trinh Nguyen and Kelly Wang, “India's Womenomics? Modi’s Decade of Formalisation of Jobs Marches Forward,” Natixis, March 8, 2024.
“How India's Economy Can Break the Mold (with Rohit Lamba),” Grand Tamasha, May 15, 2024.
“The Great Indian Poverty—and Inequality—Debate (with Maitreesh Ghatak),” Grand Tamasha, April 24, 2024.
“Decoding the Indian Economy (with Pranjul Bhandari),” Grand Tamasha, April 3, 2024.

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Milan Vaishnav, “Looking back before looking ahead in 2024,” Hindustan Times, June 5, 2024.
Sunetra Choudhury, “As Cong nears 100 seats, Kharge makes overtures to NDA parties, works the phone,” Hindustan Times, June 4, 2024.
Rahul Verma, “Elections that reminded netas, people are the boss,” Times of India, June 5, 2024.
“India Elects 2024,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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“Christophe Jaffrelot on India’s First Dictatorship,” Grand Tamasha, April 14, 2021.
Sudha Ramachandran, “Christophe Jaffrelot on What Makes Brand Modi Successful,” The Diplomat, April 8, 2024.
Christophe Jaffrelot, “A Deeper State,” The Caravan, February 13, 2024.
Christophe Jaffrelot, “The enduring personality cult of Narendra Modi,” February 13, 2024.

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Karthik Muralidharan, Niehaus, Paul, and Sandip Sukhtankar, "General Equilibrium Effects of (Improving) Public Employment Programs: Experimental Evidence from India," Econometrica91, no. 4 (2023): 1261-1295.
Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus, and Sandip Sukhtankar, "Integrating Biometric Authentication in India’s Welfare Programs: Lessons from a Decade of Reforms," Center for Effective Global Action Working Papers, University of California, 2022.
Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus, Sandip Sukhtankar, and Jeffrey Weaver, "Improving Last-Mile Service Delivery Using Phone-Based Monitoring," American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 13, no. 2 (2021): 52-82.
Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus, and Sandip Sukhtankar, "Building State Capacity: Evidence from Biometric Smartcards in India," American Economic Review 106, no. 10 (2016): 2895-2929.
Karthik Muralidharan, “A New Approach to Public Sector Hiring in India for Improved Service Delivery,” India Policy Forum 12, no. 1 (2016): 187-236.

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Breaking the Mould: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity is a big new book by the economists Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba. The book is both a critique of India’s development model as well as a manifesto for reform.Most notably, it challenges the conventional wisdom that India’s primary goal should be to transform the country into a blue-collar manufacturing powerhouse. Rajan and Lamba argue that India cannot duplicate China’s development model, but it has the opportunity to leapfrog by focusing higher up the value chain.To discuss the book’s ideas and its policy implications, Milan is joined on the show this week by Rohit Lamba. Rohit is an economist at New York University-Abu Dhabi and will soon be joining the Economics Department at Cornell University. He’s twice worked in the chief economic advisor’s office in the Indian Ministry of Finance.The two discuss what the critics get right about the Indian economy, why India cannot blindly follow the Chinese model, and how India can pivot “from brawn to brain.” Plus, Rohit and Milan discuss the manufacturing versus services debate, India’s inward economic turn, and what India must do to upgrade its human capital.

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Episode notes:

Rahul Bhattacharya, “Rahul Gandhi is on the march. But where is he heading?” 1843 Magazine, May 2, 2024.
Samanth Subramanian, “multi-storied,” Substack newsletter.
Bhagi Siva and Samanth Subramanian, “What it takes to live near an elephant herd,” Washington Post, January 21, 2024.
Samanth Subramanian, “When the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood,” New Yorker, October 10, 2022.
Samanth Subramanian, “How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart,” Guardian, February 20, 2020.

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Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “Lok Sabha polls: BJP announces new candidate for Ladakh,” Hindustan Times, April 23, 2024.
Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “No changes to constitution, assures PM,” Hindustan Times, April 22, 2024.
Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “Odisha gives BJP sleepless nights,” Hindustan Times, April 18, 2024.
Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “Lok Sabha election manifestos: Modi’s Guarantee, Congress’s NYAY,” Hindustan Times, April 16, 2024.
Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “String of new BJP entrants puts focus on headhunter,” Hindustan Times, April 16, 2024.
Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “BJP Lok Sabha poll manifesto: A mix of welfare politics, ideological causes,” Hindustan Times, April 14, 2024.
“Previewing India's 2024 General Election (with Sukumar Ranganathan),” Grand Tamasha, April 17, 2024.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Why voters’ silence is making the BJP nervous,” Indian Express, April 24, 2024.

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Maitreesh Ghatak and Rishabh Kumar, “Poverty in India Over the Last Decade: Data, Debates, and Doubts,” The India Forum, April 10, 2024.
Maitreesh Ghatak, “The rise of the affluent is the real India growth story,” Hindustan Times, February 29, 2024.
Maitreesh Ghatak, “The simmering debate over poverty rate,” Mint, May 4, 2023.
Maitreesh Ghatak, Ramya Raghavan, and Linchuan Xu, “Trends in Economic Inequality in India,” The India Forum, September 19, 2022.
Maitreesh Ghatak, “India’s Inequality Problem,” The India Forum, June 23, 2021.
“The Crisis in India’s Economic Data (with Pramit Bhattacharya),” Grand Tamasha, February 12, 2020.
“Decoding the Indian Economy (with Pranjul Bhandari),” Grand Tamasha, April 3, 2024.

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Milan Vaishnav, “On electoral bonds, a short-lived celebration,” Hindustan Times, February 17, 2024.
“Decoding the Indian Economy (with Pranjul Bhandari)” Grand Tamasha, April 3, 2024.
Sukumar Ranganathan, “Five Things with @HT_Ed,” Hindustan Times (newsletter).
Hindustan Times, General Elections Retrospective (accessed via the HT app).

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Ankit Panda, Indo-Pacific Missile Arsenals: Avoiding Spirals and Mitigating Escalation Risks (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2023).
“Southern Asia's Nuclear Future with Ashley J. Tellis,” Grand Tamasha, October 26, 2022.
Ankit Panda, “The Indo-Pacific’s new missile age demands Washington’s attention,” Breaking Defense, November 16, 2023.
Ankit Panda, “How India’s breakthrough as an ‘elite space power’ devalues discovery and innovation,” South China Morning Post, April 7, 2019.
Alex Travelli, “The Surprising Striver in the World’s Space Business,” New York Times, July 4, 2023.
Toby Dalton et al., “Dimming Prospects for U.S.-Russia Nonproliferation Cooperation,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 14, 2024.

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Mohamed El-Erian and Michael Spence, “The Indian Giant Has Arrived,” Project Syndicate, March 22, 2024.
Pranjul Bhandari, “Beyond the budget: what happened when no one was really looking?” Mint, January 30, 2024.
Pranjul Bhandari, “India’s fiscal future: Lots done, more to do,” Mint, November 22, 2023.
Pranjul Bhandari, “India’s growth prospects are on the up. What changed?” Indian Express, December 19, 2023.
Pranjul Bhandari, “Building an India for manufacturers,” Indian Express, October 9, 2023.

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“What’s Happening to India’s Rohingya Refugees? (with Priyali Sur and Daniel Sullivan),” Grand Tamasha, May 24, 2023.
Mohsin Alam Bhat and Aashish Yadav, “CAA will not help persecuted Hindus, Sikhs from neighbouring countries,” Indian Express, March 19, 2024.
“The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019,” PRS Legislative Research.
Madhav Khosla and Milan Vaishnav, “The Three Faces of the Indian State,” Journal of Democracy 32, no. 1 (2021): 111-125.
Mohsin Alam Bhat, “The Constitutional Case Against the Citizenship Amendment Bill,” Economic and Political Weekly 54, no.3 (2019): 12-14.
Mohsin Alam Bhat, “‘The Irregular’ and the Unmaking of Minority Citizenship: The Rules of Law in Majoritarian India,” Queen Mary Law Research Paper No. 395/2022.
Niraja Gopal Jayal, “Faith-based Citizenship,” The India Forum, October 31, 2019.

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Episode notes:

Sidharth Bhatia, “An Eating and Drinking Tour of India, With Some Misadventures Along the Way,” The Wire, July 8, 2023.
Zac O’Yeah, “A culinary trip across Southeast Asia,” Indian Express, January 6, 2024.

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Devesh Kapur, Chandra Bhan Prasad, Lant Pritchett, and D. Shyam Babu, “Rethinking Inequality: Dalits in Uttar Pradesh in the Market Reform Era,” Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 35 (August 28-September 3, 2010): 39-49.
Devesh Kapur, Chandra Bhan Prasad, and D. Shyam Babu, Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs (New Delhi: Vintage, 2014).
D. Shyam Babu, “From empowerment to disenfranchisement: Lower caste mobilisation appears to have run its course,” Times of India, August 28, 2019.
Chandra Bhan Prasad, “Fellow Dalits, open your own bank: If no one else, Dalit middle class can fund Dalit capitalism to produce Dalit billionaires,” Times of India, November 25, 2019.
Devesh Kapur, “Fraternity in the making of the Indian nation,” Seminar 701 (2017).

Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs

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Milan Vaishnav, “On electoral bonds, a short-lived celebration,” Hindustan Times, February 17, 2024.
“Crime and Politics with Milan Vaishnav,” The DAKSH Podcast, September 2022.
Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav, eds., Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

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Constantino Xavier and Riya Sinha, “How India Budgets to Become a Leading Power,” Centre for Social and Economic Progress, February 8, 2023.
Constantino Xavier, “India: Looking to Help Frame a New Global Balance,” in Regional Security Outlook 2023 (Canberra: Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, 2022).
Constantino Xavier and Amitendu Palit, eds., Connectivity and Cooperation in the Bay of Bengal Region (New Delhi: Centre for Social and Economic Progress, 2023).
Constantino Xavier and Jabin Jacob, eds., How China Engages South Asia: Themes, Partners and Tools(New Delhi: Centre for Social and Economic Progress, 2023).
Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Remarks on India and the United States: A Vision for the 21st Century,” Chennai, India, July 20, 2011.

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“South Asia’s Economic Turmoil (with Ben Parkin),” Grand Tamasha, September 21, 2022.
“Pakistan After Imran Khan (with Aqil Shah),” Grand Tamasha, May 4, 2022.
Zoha Waseem, “A House Divided: Karachi’s Politics Remain in Flux,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 3, 2022.

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Karan Thapar, “Debunking propaganda myths, restoring truths,” Hindustan Times, January 27, 2024.
Sreenivasan Jain, Mariyam Alavi, and Supriya Sharma, “Bringing Journalistic Scrutiny to Hindutva Conspiracy Theories,” The Wire, January 17, 2024.

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“India's Tryst With Policymaking (with Pranay Kotasthane),” Grand Tamasha, January 25, 2023.
Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S. Jaitley, Missing In Action : Why You Should Care About Public Policy (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2023).
Pranay Kotasthane, “Anticipating the Unintended,” weekly Substack newsletter.

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“What the Personal Data Protection Act Means for India (with Rahul Matthan),” Grand Tamasha, Septemner 27, 2023.
“Book Discussion: The Third Way: India’s Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance,” Carnegie India Global Technology Summit 2023, December 7, 2023.
Rahul Matthan, “Tech policy in India has had a year packed with action,” Mint, December 27, 2023.

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Back in 2019, we started the Grand Tamasha podcast on a whim. India’s 2019 general elections were around the corner, and we sensed that there might be a (temporary) marketplace for a weekly audio podcast focused on Indian politics and policy for diehards hoping to keep up with the campaign action. Nearly five years later, the podcast has become a weekly fixture and the marketplace has turned out to be more welcoming that we had imagined.For Milan, one of the joys of doing a podcast week-in and week-out is the ability to read some of the best new books on India and speak with their authors—from journalists to historians, and political scientists to novelists. Last year, we published our first annual list of our favorite books featured on the podcast in 2022. As the current year comes to an end and we prepare for a mini-podcast hibernation for the holidays, here—in no particular order—are our Grand Tamasha top books of 2023 (drumroll, please): Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century By Joya Chatterji. Published by Yale University Press, Penguin Random House India, Vintage. Migrants and Machine Politics: How India's Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness By Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil. Published by Princeton University Press. Age of Vice By Deepti Kapoor. Published by Riverhead, Juggernaut. Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India By Akshay Mangla. Published by Cambridge University Press. In this episode, Milan talks about why he loved each of these books and includes short clips from his conversations with Joya, Adam and Tariq, Deepti, and Akshay. Think of this final episode of our tenth season as our little holiday present to you—our listeners.

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Prashant Jha, “What BJP wins in 3 states mean for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections,” Hindustan Times, December 4, 2023.
Vaibhav Tiwari, “‘Conceit’: Congress slammed by INDIA bloc allies after 3-1 election drubbing,” Hindustan Times, December 4, 2023.
Ritesh Mishra and Dipankar Ghose, “Misfired OBC gambit, infighting: How to lose a mandate in 5 years,” Hindustan Times, December 4, 2023.
Sunetra Choudhury, “HT Interview: Unsavoury words were used against me…Madhya Pradesh election results have silenced them: Scindia,” Hindustan Times, December 4, 2023.

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Michael Greenstone et al., “The Solvable Challenge of Air Pollution in India,” India Policy Forum 2017-18: 1-51.
Michael Greenstone et al., A Roadmap Towards Cleaning India’s Air (EPIC India and Harvard Kennedy School, 2018).
Michael Greenstone et al., “Can Pollution Markets Work in Developing Countries? Experimental Evidence from India,” Working Paper, January 27, 2023.

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“India’s Hidden Treatise on Statecraft (with Rahul Sagar),” Grand Tamasha, November 2, 2022.
“The Hidden History of Conservative Economics in Post-1947 India (with Aditya Balasubramanian,” Grand Tamasha, October 11, 2023.
“Ramachandra Guha Revisits India After Gandhi,” Grand Tamasha, April 19, 2023.

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. “A Court in Crisis? Interview with the authors of 'Court on Trial', a data-driven analysis of the Supreme Court of India,”Bar&Bench, September 7, 2023.
[VIDEO] “How do we fix the Supreme Court of India?”Scroll Ideas, September 1, 2023.
Soutik Biswas, “Supreme Court: Why India's powerful top court is in a 'crisis,’”BBC News, July 31, 2023.

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Sanjay Ruparelia, “The opportunities and challenges of courting India,” in Maxwell A. Cameron, David Gillies and David Carment, eds.,Democracy and Foreign Policy in an Era of Uncertainty: Canada Among Nations 2022(Palgrave Macmillan, 2023): 241-268.
“Reframing Canada’s Global Engagement: Ten Strategic Choices for Decision-Makers,” Global Canada, September 2020.
Sanjay Ruparelia, “In India, the government’s election machine is humming – but the economy and democracy are at risk,”The Globe and Mail, March 22, 2022.

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Crystal A. Ennis and Nicolas Blarel, eds.,The South Asia to Gulf Migration Governance Complex(Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press, 2022).
Nicolas Blarel,The Evolution of India's Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Sumit Ganguly and Nicolas Blarel, “Modi’s Comments on Israel-Gaza War Signal Shift,”Foreign Policy, October 12, 2023.
Nicolas Blarel, “Navigating Asian Rivalries: Israel’s ties with China and India,” National University of Singapore-Middle East Institute, Singapore Insights No. 300, July 25, 2023.

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1. Carole Spary, “Women candidates, women voters, and the gender politics of India’s 2019 parliamentary election,”Contemporary South Asia28, no. 2 (2020): 223-241.

Carole Spary, “Missed opportunities: time is running out for the Indian government to pass legislative gender quotas bill,” King’s India Institute, November 1, 2018.
Shireen M. Rai and Carole Spary, “Populism, parliament, and performance,”Seminar752 (April 2022)

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1.Ajay Mathur, “International finance must take a lead in mobilising solar investments,”Business Standard, September 7, 2023

Ajay Mathur, “Here's how solar can help triple renewable energy by 2030,” World Economic Forum, August 14, 2023.
“What COP26 Means for India—and the World,” (with Navroz Dubash),Grand Tamasha, November 17, 2021.
“How India Can Get to Net Zero Emissions,” (with Jayant Sinha),Grand Tamasha, October 13, 2021.

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Aditya Balasubramanian, “Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India,” Lecture at King’s India Institute, July 5, 2023.
Aditya Balasubramanian, “Some lessons for INDIA from the Swatantra Party,” Hindustan Times, August 31, 2023.

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William Dalrymple, “Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji review – charming, genre-defying study,” The Guardian, July 3, 2023.
Rana Mitter, “Shadows at Noon — Joya Chatterji exposes the beating heart of south Asia,” Financial Times, August 11, 2023.
“Ramachandra Guha Revisits India After Gandhi,” Grand Tamasha, April 19, 2023.

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Prashant Jha, “On Modi’s foreign policy, here is what the Opposition gets it wrong,” Hindustan Times, September 14, 2023.
Ashok Malik, “The continuity constituency and Modi's re-election bid,” Economic Times, August 29, 2023.
[VIDEO] “G20 Summit 2023 India (with Ashok Malik),” CNN-News18, September 12, 2023.
“Ro Khanna on the U.S.-India Partnership,” Hindustan Times, September 13, 2023.

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Ro Khanna, “The New Industrial Age,”Foreign Affairs, January/February 2023.
“The Next Chapter in U.S.-India Defense Ties(with Lindsey Ford),”Grand Tamasha, September 5, 2023.
Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, Jonathan Kay, and Milan Vaishnav, “Social Realities of Indian Americans: Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 9, 2021.
Arvin Alaigh, “A Reckoning for the Modi Democrats,”Dissent, December 23, 2020.

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“Reexamining America’s Bet on India (with Ashley J. Tellis),” Grand Tamasha, June 21, 2023.
[VIDEO] Ely Ratner and Lindsey Ford, “Building a More Resilient Indo-Pacific Security Architecture, Hudson Institute,” March 2, 2023.
The White House, “Joint Statement from the United States and India,” June 22, 2023.
Rudra Chaudhuri, Konark Bhandari, and Ashima Singh, “The U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET): The Way Forward,” Carnegie India, January 24, 2023.

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Last week on the show, Milan sat down with the Carnegie Endowment’s Ashley J. Tellis to discuss his much talked about Foreign Affairs essay titled, “America’s Bad Bet on India.”

In that piece, Ashley argues that if U.S. policymakers are expecting India to come to America’s aid in the event of a military conflict with China, they would be well advised to keep their expectations in check. Ashley argues that such a military coalition is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future.

A month after Ashley’s piece was published, the scholar Arzan Tarapore penned a response in Foreign Affairs titled, “America’s Best Bet in the Indo-Pacific.”

Arzan, a Research Scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, joins Milan on the show this week to discuss why coalition warfare is the wrong benchmark with which to assess U.S.-India security cooperation.

Milan and Arzan discuss the policy differences between Delhi and Washington, the practical ways in which the United States and India can cooperate to constrain China, and the prospects of iCET (the U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology). Plus, the two discuss the future of the Quad and how Australia fits into the budding U.S.-India partnership.

Episode notes:

“Reexamining America’s Bet on India (with Ashley J. Tellis),” Grand Tamasha, June 21, 2023.
Arzan Tarapore, “What the Quad could learn from AUKUS,” The Interpreter (blog), April 3, 2023.
Christopher Chivvis, “What Biden Wants From Modi’s State Visit,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 20, 2023.
“Pivotal States: What Direction for the U.S.-India Partnership (with Christopher Chivvis, Lisa Curtis, and Ashley J. Tellis),” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 9, 2023

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Last week on the show, Milan sat down with the Carnegie Endowment’s Ashley J. Tellis to discuss his much talked about Foreign Affairs essay titled, “America’s Bad Bet on India.”

In that piece, Ashley argues that if U.S. policymakers are expecting India to come to America’s aid in the event of a military conflict with China, they would be well advised to keep their expectations in check. Ashley argues that such a military coalition is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future.

A month after Ashley’s piece was published, the scholar Arzan Tarapore penned a response in Foreign Affairs titled, “America’s Best Bet in the Indo-Pacific.”

Arzan, a Research Scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, joins Milan on the show this week to discuss why coalition warfare is the wrong benchmark with which to assess U.S.-India security cooperation.

Milan and Arzan discuss the policy differences between Delhi and Washington, the practical ways in which the United States and India can cooperate to constrain China, and the prospects of iCET (the U.S.-India Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology). Plus, the two discuss the future of the Quad and how Australia fits into the budding U.S.-India partnership.

Episode notes:

“Reexamining America’s Bet on India (with Ashley J. Tellis),” Grand Tamasha, June 21, 2023.

Arzan Tarapore, “What the Quad could learn from AUKUS,” The Interpreter (blog), April 3, 2023.

Christopher Chivvis, “What Biden Wants From Modi’s State Visit,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 20, 2023.

“Pivotal States: What Direction for the U.S.-India Partnership (with Christopher Chivvis, Lisa Curtis, and Ashley J. Tellis),” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 9, 2023

Arzan Tarapore, “India and the US gear up for strategic competition,” The Strategist, June 26, 2023.

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In a few days, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will arrive in Washington, D.C. to begin a historic state visit that is expected to further cement ties between the United States and India. Over the past two decades, this relationship has gone from awkward resentment during the Cold War to full-throated embrace after the year 2000.

But a new essay byAshley J. TellisinForeign Affairstitled, “America’s Bad Bet on India,” warns that there are limits to U.S.-India cooperation and Washington would be wise to wake up to them. Ashley, who holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, joins Milan on the podcast this week to discuss his essay and his motivations for writing it.

Ashley and Milan discuss the bipartisan bet U.S. officials have made on India since the year 2000, the logic of “strategic altruism,” and the challenges facing the bilateral defense partnership. Plus, the two preview Modi’s state visit and discuss both its symbolic importance as well as it’s substantive significance.

Episode notes:

Ashley J. Tellis, “America’s Bad Bet on India,”Foreign Affairs, May 1, 2023.
“U.S.-India Relations, With Ashley J. Tellis,”The President’s Inbox(podcast), May 16, 2023.
Ashley J. Tellis, Bibek Debroy, and C. Raja Mohan, eds.,Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power(New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2022)
Arzan Tarapore, “America’s Best Bet in the Indo-Pacific,”Foreign Affairs, May 29, 2023.

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Later this summer, California could be first American state to ban discrimination on the basis of caste. California’s move, and the moves by universities, cities, and towns across the country, to raise issues of caste discrimination has generated a massive controversy that is roiling the Indian American community in the United States.

One reporter, the freelance journalist Sonia Paul, has been doggedly pursuing this story for years, even before it became a mainstream news issue. Sonia is an award-winning journalist, writer, producer and story editor based in Oakland, California, and she is the daughter of immigrants from India and the Philippines.

Sonia joins Milan on the show this week to talk more about her reporting and the state of caste in America. Sonia and Milan discuss the difficulties of reporting on caste in America, the coded ways in which discrimination often takes place, and the debates in the Indian American community over moves to add caste as a protected category. Plus, the two discuss the fierce contest over California’s draft legislation.

Episode notes:

Sonia Paul, “The hidden caste codes of Silicon Valley,” BBC, April 18, 2023.

Sonia Paul, “Trapped in Silicon Valley’s Hidden Caste System,” Wired, March 1, 2022.

“California Could Become the First State to Ban Caste Discrimination,” KQED “The Bay” (podcast), June 5, 2023.

Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, Jonathan Kay, and Milan Vaishnav, “Social Realities of Indian Americans: Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 9, 2021.

Maari Zwick-Maitreyi, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Natasha Dar, Ralph F. Bheel, and Prathap Balakrishnan, Caste in the United States: A Survey of Caste Among South Asian Americans (Equality Labs, 2018).

Sonia Paul, “From Black Lives Matter, activists for India’s discriminated Dalits learn tactics to press for dignity,” The World, November 12, 2015.

Patrick Cox, “Which version of Indian history do American school students learn?,” The World, April 27, 2017.

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Leaders come and go, but institutions stay forever. This is the central takeaway of a new book by Subhashish Bhadra, Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back.

Subhashish is an economist whose career has straddled both the policy and corporate worlds. He has worked at a leading global management consulting firm, a venture capital firm, and a tech start-up, working closely with CEOs, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, politicians and academics throughout his career.

His new book is a call to action that encourages Indians to move beyond their fixation with leaders and focus instead on building strong state institutions. While discussions of state capacity are typically the stuff of academic conference rooms and think tank seminars, Bhadra believes they should be at the core of everyday discussions Indians have on the future of their democracy.

Subhashish joins Milan on the show this week to discuss his motivations for writing the book, the institutional flaws in Indian democracy, the need for a new “social contract” on welfare, and the appropriate balance between states and markets in India. Plus, Subhashish explains what ordinary citizens can do to change the status quo.

Episode notes:

Anirudh Burman, “Resisting the Leviathan: The Key Change in India’s New Proposal to Protect Personal Data,” Carnegie India, November 28, 2022.

Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah, In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2022).

Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and Milan Vaishnav, eds.Rethinking Public Institutions in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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If you’ve spent any time reading books, watching movies about—or traveling to—India—chances are you’ve come across the depiction of an urban slum somewhere along the way. In most of these popular portrayals, slums are dens of inequity and deprivation. Citizens appear to be trapped in a vortex of poverty, bad governance, and corruption. In these stories, politicians and their henchmen appear to have the last laugh, extracting whatever they can from citizens who have few exit options.

A new book by the political scientists Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, Migrants and Machine Politics, informs us that much of what we think we know is based on myth, not fact.

Adam and Tariq join Milan on the podcast this week to discuss a decade’s worth of research in the slums of Bhopal and Jaipur. The trio discuss what slums look like from the bottom-up rather than the top-down, the realities of machine politics in India, and the surprising agency that poor citizens possess. Plus, they discuss how two trends—centralization and Hindu nationalism—might shape the future of local politics.

Episode notes:

Adam Auerbach et al. “Rethinking the Study of Electoral Politics in the Developing World: Reflections on the Indian Case,” Perspectives on Politics 20, no. 1 (2022): 250-264.

Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, “Cultivating Clients: Reputation, Responsiveness, and Ethnic Indifference in India's Slums,” American Journal of Political Science 64, no. 3 (2020): 471-487.

Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, “How Clients Select Brokers: Competition and Cho

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The Rohingya people have suffered decades of persecution in Myanmar, most recently in 2017 when the country’s security forces launched a major crackdown on the minority group—causing more than a million Rohingya to flee the country. While the vast majority of Rohingya sought refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh, India has been home to tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees.

A new report by The Azadi Project and Refugees International—A Shadow of Refuge: Rohingya Refugees in India—sheds light on the plight of Rohingya in India, drawing from field visits in Delhi and Hyderabad. The authors of this new report are Daniel Sullivan and Priyali Surand they join Milan on the show this week to talk more about their report.

The trio discuss the absence of Indian law on refugees and asylum seekers, the Rohingya’s living conditions in India, and the shrinking number of vocal advocates for their cause. Plus, the three discuss the foreign policy implications of the refugees and what role the United States might play.

Episode notes:

[VIDEO] “Displaced and Detained: Rohingya in India,” The Azadi Project, May 16, 2024.

Khushboo Sandhu and Meryl Sebastian, “Rohingya and CAA: What is India's refugee policy?” BBC, August 19, 2022.

Refugees International, “The Situation of the Rohingya and Deadly Sea Crossings,” March 1, 2023.

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On May 13, the Congress Party notched a major election win—a decisive single-party majority in the southern state of Karnataka—earning the highest vote share of any party in the state since 1989. For the Congress, which is starved of election victories, this result could not have come at a better time as the country gears up for national elections early next year. The incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) put in a disappointing performance, one that is likely to prompt some soul-searching as the party regroups for another round of regional polls this fall.

To unpack what happened in Karnataka and what it means—for the state and for India—Milan is joined on the podcast this week by author and journalist Sugata Srinivasaraju. Sugata is one of the most respected political journalists in Karnataka and the author of several books, including Furrows in a Field: The Unexplored Life of HD Deve Gowda.

The two discuss the contours of an expensive and animated election campaign, the keys to the Congress Party’s success, the impact of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra, and why the “Modi magic” did not turn the tide for the BJP. Plus, the two discuss what this round of polls tells us about next year’s general elections.

Episode notes:

“Religious Polarization in Karnataka (with Sugata Srinivasaraju),” Grand Tamasha, April 13, 2022.
[VIDEO] Sugata Srinivasaraju, “Karnataka Results 2023: Decoding the failure of JD-S as the kingmaker,” Times of India, May 14, 2023.
Dhrubo Jyoti, “Cong conquers Karnataka with 136 seats,” Hindustan Times, May 14, 2023.
Shoaib Daniyal, “Modi and Hindutva: Why did BJP’s two big guns fail to fire in Karnataka?” The India Fix (newsletter), May 14, 2023.

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Since Independence, the Indian state has grappled with a variety of internal security challenges—insurgencies, terrorist attacks, caste and communal violence, riots, and electoral violence. Their toll has claimed more lives than all of India's five external wars combined.

Despite this, we know surprisingly little about the institutions of the state tasked with managing internal security. How well has India contained violence and preserved order? How have the approaches and capacity of the State evolved to attain these twin objectives? And what impact does the State's approach have on civil liberties and the quality of democracy?

These are three questions that a new book, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State, takes up. It’s an important new volume co-edited by two of the best-known political scientists working on India—Amit Ahuja of the University of California-Santa Barbara and Devesh Kapur of Johns Hopkins-SAIS.

Amit and Devesh join Milan on the podcast this week to discuss their new book and the lessons it holds for law and order in India. The trio discuss the centralization of internal security powers, the surprising decline in public violence, and the explosion in the size of India’s paramilitary forces. Plus, the three debate whether violence has moved from the periphery of Indian politics to center stage.

Soutik Biswas, “Is India seeing a decline in violence?” BBC News, January 16, 2023.
Ajai Shukla, “India's tryst with counterinsurgency,” Business Standard, March 15, 2023.
Devesh Kapur, “The worrying rise of militarisation in India’s Central Armed Police Forces,” ThePrint, November 29, 2017.
Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur, “Internal security threats: the 1980s,”Hindustan Times, 2022.

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At long last, we come to that time in every Grand Tamasha season where Milan stops to round up the last news on Indian politics and policy with two longtime friends of the podcast—Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution.

This week on the show, the trio discuss three topics. First, they discuss India’s passing China as the world’s most populous country and what this means for the country’s future prospects. Second, there’s been a steady drumbeat of articles and Twitter discussions about India’s role in the world, prompted in part by the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, among others. Milan, Sadanand, and Tanvi discuss the latest on Indian foreign policy. Last but not least, many scholars and analysts believe India’s democracy is moving in reverse but who exactly has the standing to debate and discuss these developments? They take on that question as well.

Episode notes:

Sadanand Dhume, “Will India’s Growing Population Bring an Economic Boom?” Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2023.

Mujib Mashal and Alex Travelli, “India Is Passing China in Population. Can Its Economy Ever Do the Same?” New York Times, April 19, 2023.

“'Europe Has to Grow Out of Mindset That Its Problems Are World's Problems': Jaishankar,” Press Trust of India, June 3, 2022.

Tanvi Madan, “Lessons from Ukraine: It’s Complicated,” Brookings Institution, February 24, 2023.

Walter Russell Mead, “India’s BJP Is the World’s Most Important Party,” Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2023.

Barkha Dutt, “The best way to strengthen India’s democracy? Leave it to the Indians,” Washington Post, April 20, 2023.

Adam Tooze, “Why CPR Is Necessary and the Suspension of Its Registration Dangerous,” The Wire, March 29, 2023.

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Nonalignment, secularism, socialism, democracy, high modernism—these are all ideas that students of India have long associated with India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. These elements have been so embedded in the Indian psyche that we regularly speak of a “Nehruvian consensus” without thinking twice.

A new book by the scholar Taylor C. Sherman, a professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, revisits this consensus and finds that all is not what it seems. These high-minded notions that we’ve long associated with Nehru are—at their core—myths. And like all good myths, there’s a kernel of truth somewhere in there but the reality is far more nuanced.

Taylor joins Milan on the show this week to discuss these myths, which she’s documented in a new book, Nehru's India: A History in Seven Myths. The two discuss the disconnect between Nehru’s rhetoric and the lived realities on the ground, the trouble with the notion of a “Nehruvian consensus,” and the “software” bugs of Indian democracy. Plus, the two discuss how Nehru’s legacy can help us understand the rise of Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Episode notes:

Taylor C. Sherman, “The Myth of Nehru the Architect of Independent India,” in Nehru's India: A History in Seven Myths (Princeton University Press, 2022).

“Revisiting the Myths of Nehru’s India: Apoorvanand in Conversation with Taylor C. Sherman,” The Wire, February 25, 2023.

“Nehru's Long Shadow Over India (with Adeel Hussain and Tripudaman Singh),” Grand Tamasha, February 23, 2022.

“Madhav Khosla on India’s Founding Moment,” Grand Tamasha, January 29, 2020.

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Find a list of the defining books about India published in the last 75 years and there’s one book that will show up on list after list after list—Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Gandhi.

For years, historians approached India as if history more or less ended with the partition of the subcontinent and the achievement of India’s independence in 1947. Guha’s India After Gandhi broke this mold and, in so doing, helped to define what a generation of students, scholars, and readers understands of India in the decades after independence.

This year, Picador has published the third edition of India After Gandhi, which brings the book’s narrative up to the present day with a new chapter on the post-2016 Modi era.

To talk about his landmark book—and some of the themes that it covers—Ram Guha joins Milan on the podcast this week. The two discuss Gandhi’s legacy after 75 years of independence, the inspiration behind India After Gandhi, and the transformation of Indian democracy in the past decade. Plus, the two discuss the themes, events, and people from India’s history that are crying out for greater evaluation.

Episode notes:

Ramachandra Guha, “India against Gandhi — a legacy rewritten,” Financial Times, January 27, 2023.

Ritika Chopra, “Purged from NCERT Textbooks: Hindu extremists’ dislike for Gandhi, RSS ban after assassination,” Indian Express, April 8, 2023.

Ramachandra Guha, “The Cult of Modi,” Foreign Policy, November 4, 2022.

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India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today is a big new book on India by the economist Ashoka Mody. Mody is an economic historian at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs and a longtime official at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

His new book provides readers with an unvarnished look at India’s twin economic and political failures over the past 75 years. Challenging the conventional wisdom, Mody argues that India’s post-independence leaders—from Jawaharlal Nehru all the way to Narendra Modi—have failed to confront India's true economic problems, seeking easy solutions instead. As a popular frustration grew, India’s democracy suffered, leading to an upsurge in nationalism, violence, and corruption.

Ashoka Mody, “India’s Boom Is a Dangerous Myth,” Project Syndicate, March 29, 2023.

Ashoka Mody, “India’s Broken State,” Project Syndicate, February 20, 2023.

Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

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Menaka Doshi, “India’s SEBI to submit report on Adani to Court-Appointed Panel,” Bloomberg, March 29, 2023.

Menaka Doshi and Rajesh Kumar Singh, “Adani Total Gas Says Expansion and Spending Plans are Intact,” Bloomberg, February 7, 2023.

Hindenburg Group, How the World’s 3rd Richest Man is Pulling the Largest Con in Corporate History, January 24, 2023.

Adani Group, “Adani Response,” January 29, 2023.

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Over the decades, India has developed a reputation for having a strong society but a weak state. This bureaucratic, lumbering behemoth has especially struggled to deliver basic public goods like health, education, water, and sanitation. But a new book by the University of Oxford political scientist Akshay Mangla, Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India, forces us to revise this conventional wisdom. In some parts of India, the state has succeeded in delivering quality primary education for its poorest citizens despite sharing the same institutional framework and often the same demographic characteristics of other, poorly performing regions. To talk more about why and when the state works, Akshay joins Milan on the podcast this week. Akshay and Milan discuss the importance of norms in driving policy implementation, the stark variation in education outcomes in north India, and how authoritarianism and deliberation can coexist. Plus, the two discuss the Modi government’s New Education Policy and the future of primary education in the country.

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India's nuclear program is often conceived as an inward-looking endeavour of secretive technocrats. But a new book by the scholar Jayita Sarkar, Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, challenges the conventional wisdom, narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years.

It is a story about nuclear ambiguity, Cold War geopolitics, territorial ambition, and visionary engineers and scientists. Jayita, who is a senior lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow and the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative, joins Milan on the show this week to talk more about her book.

The two discuss the elite coterie of scientists and engineers responsible for India’s nuclear program, the myth of India’s peaceful, non-violent rise, and the many global inputs to India’s nuclear ambitions. Plus, the two discuss the surprising roots of India’s controversial 1974 nuclear tests and the country’s struggles to fulfil its nuclear energy potential at home.

“Southern Asia's Nuclear Future with Ashley J. Tellis,” Grand Tamasha, October 26, 2022.
[Open-access] Jayita Sarkar, Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).

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Thirty years ago, Seema Sirohi first moved to Washington as a journalist charged with covering India’s relationship with the United States. At the time, Washington saw India as a problem—rather than a useful part of its foreign policy solution—to big, complex global challenges.

Today, the situation could not be more different: the United States and India are deeply enmeshed in a strategic partnership that runs the gamut, from space to terrorism, and from climate change to technology. Seema, a U.S.-based columnist for the Economic Times, narrates this tectonic shift in a new book, Friends with Benefits: the India-U.S. Story.

On this week’s show, she joins Milan to discuss the book and her own personal journey. They discuss the evolution of U.S.-India ties over the past three decades, including the rocky years of the early 1990s, the breakthrough in the George W. Bush administration, and the setbacks towards the end of India’s UPA-2 government. Plus, the two discuss the Washington establishment’s blind spots on both China and Pakistan and how these have repeatedly come at the cost of greater cooperation with India in years past.

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Age of Vice is the blockbuster new novel by the author Deepti Kapoor. It’s a love story, wrapped inside a tale of capitalism run amok, wrapped inside a violent story of gangland politics.

In nearly 600 pages, it transports readers from the badlands of eastern Uttar Pradesh to the five-star hotels and fabulous bungalows of New Delhi. To call this book a sensation would be the understatement of the year. Readers have snapped up copies, book editors have issued glowing reviews, and a television series is already in the works.

Deepti Kapoor grew up in north India and worked for several years as a journalist in New Delhi. She’s the author of a previous novel, A Bad Character, published in 2015.

To talk more about Age ofVice and the inspiration behind it, Deepti joins Milan on the podcast this week. They discuss Deepti’s journey from Delhi reporter to novelist, the research she conducted for the book, and the cynicism embedded in Indian politics. Plus, the two discuss the book’s adaptation for the screen and the planned trilogy of books that is in the works.

Ron Charles, “Deepti Kapoor’s thriller ‘Age of Vice’ starts 2023 with a bang,” Washington Post, December 29, 2022.
Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
Josy Joseph, A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2016).
Deepti Kapoor, “Driving in Greater Noida,” Granta, February 23, 2015.

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The decline of India’s parliament is a refrain that has often been repeated over the last seventy-five years of modern Indian democracy. A new book on India’s Parliament addresses the decline thesis head-on and provides a warts-and-all assessment of India’s legislative chamber.

The book is called House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy and its author is the scholar Ronojoy Sen. Ronojoy, a senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asia Studies at the National University of Singapore, joins Milan on the podcast this week to discuss the evolution of India’s parliament, the constitutional pre-history of legislative institutions in India, and the surprising lack of debate around universal suffrage.

Plus, the two discuss the plague of parliamentary disruptions, the black box of conflicts of interest, and how the practice of Indian democracy transformed the institution of Parliament.

Madhav Khosla and Milan Vaishnav, “The Three Faces of the Indian State,” Journal of Democracy 32, no. 1 (January 2021): 111-125.
Ronojoy Sen, “Has the Indian Parliament stood the test of time?” Observer Research Foundation, August 15, 2022.

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On February 24, the world will commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The ongoing war has fueled considerable debate among foreign policy analysts about the long-term consequences for the nature and evolution of global order. In the wake of the ongoing conflict, few relationships have been as hotly debated as the ties between India and Russia.

In the pages of Foreign Affairs, two of the best strategic minds working on Indian foreign policy—Happymon Jacob of Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Council for Strategic and Defense Research and Sameer Lalwani of the U.S. Institute of Peace—have engaged in a serious and constructive debate on what the future holds in store for India’s relations with Russia.

This week, Happymon and Sameer join Milan to expand on their debate. Happymon argues that we’re seeing the beginning of decoupling between Russia and India, while Sameer is sceptical. He envisions a future in which Russia-India relations, while perhaps declining, exhibit significant resilience. The trio also discusses China-Russia relations, U.S. efforts to supply India’s military, and the prospects of India serving as an honest broker to end the war.

Happymon Jacob, “Russia is Losing India,” Foreign Affairs, September 22, 2022.
Sameer Lalwani and Happymon Jacob, “Will India Ditch Russia?” Foreign Affairs, January 24, 2023.
“The Looming Cloud of Sanctions Over U.S.-India Relations (with Sameer Lalwani),” Grand Tamasha, September 29, 2021.
Sameer Lalwani and Tyler Sagerstrom, “What the India–Russia Defence Partnership Means for US Policy,” Survival (2021).
Sameer Lalwani, Frank O’Donnell, Tyler Sagerstrom, and Akriti Vasudeva, “The Influence of Arms: Explaining the Durability of India–Russia Alignment,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, January 15, 2021.
Happymon Jacob, “The futility of underbalancing China,” The Indian View (newsletter), January 23, 2023.

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In 2016, Ashley J. Tellis published an important paper in which he unpacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for India to become a leading, rather than a balancing, power on the global stage. This call reflected an important change in how the country’s top political leadership conceived of its role in international politics.

In the years following, Ashley and a group of collaborators have been working to flesh out what becoming a leading power would actually mean in practice. Their findings have finally been published in a new volume, Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power, edited by Ashley along with Bibek Debroy and C. Raja Mohan.

Ashley holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. On the show this week, Ashley joins Milan to talk about his latest project. He and Milan discuss India’s internal debate about its growing global role, the ideological constraints to realizing India’s economic potential, and lingering doubts about India’s liberal commitments. Plus, the two discuss whether India’s incremental pace of reforms is a harm or a hindrance to its wider ambitions.

Ashley J. Tellis, “Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power,” in Ashley J. Tellis, Bibek Debroy, and C. Raja Mohan, Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2022).
Ashley J. Tellis, “India as a Leading Power,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 4, 2016.
Lakshmi Puri, “The will to power: How India can become a leading power in the world,” FirstPost, January 27, 2023.
“Southern Asia's Nuclear Future With Ashley J. Tellis,” Grand Tamasha, October 26, 2022.

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Last week, India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented her government’s Fiscal Year 2023 budget. As in years past, the entire analyst class has been working overtime to scrutinize the minister’s speech and the underlying budget spreadsheets to understand how this government plans to steer the Indian economy in the midst of global headwinds and an important general election in 2024.

To discuss this year’s budget and all that it means, Milan is joined on the show this week by Sukumar Ranganathan, editor-in-chief of the Hindustan Times. There are few journalists in India who follow budgets more closely or more insightfully.

Milan and Sukumar discuss the government’s big infrastructure push, its electoral signaling, and future plans to raise revenue. Plus, the two discuss what we can say definitively about the Modi government’s economic philosophy after nine years in office.

Prashant Jha, “Budget passes BJP’s political test ahead of 2024 elections,” Hindustan Times, February 2, 2023.
Roshan Kishore, “Nightwatchman’s Budget ahead of elections,” Hindustan Times, February 2, 2023.
Abhishek Jha and Roshan Kishore, “The Indian economy: Past, present, future,” Hindustan Times, February 6, 2023.
Archana Masih interview with Milan Vaishnav, “‘Adani affair overshadowed Budget's stability, prudence,'” Rediff News, February 6, 2023.

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The Congress Party’s Bharat Jodo Yatra has spent more than 120 days traveling the length of India from the southern city of Kanniyakumari to the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir.

After traveling more than 3,500 kilometers, the march formally ended on January 30 in Srinagar.

The yatra has grabbed headlines and riled up Congress supporters, but the question remains—what does it actually mean for the future of the Congress Party?

To talk about the yatra’s legacy, Milan is joined on the show this week by Dipankar Ghose, deputy national editor of the Hindustan Times and three-time winner of the prestigious Ramnath Goenka Award. Dipankar covered the yatra when it traveled through Rajasthan in late December, and he and Milan discuss the yatra’s impact on the Congress Party’s fortunes, Rahul Gandhi’s image, and the party’s “vision” problem. Plus, the two discuss the BJP’s reaction to the yatra and what comes next for India’s struggling principal opposition party.

Dipankar Ghose, “Counting milestones: A day in the life of the Bharat Jodo Yatra,” Hindustan Times, December 16, 2022.
Dipankar Ghose, “Congress political crisis: The parallels in Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh,” Hindustan Times, September 26, 2022.
“G20, State Elections, and the Future of the Congress Party (with Sadanand Dhume and Tanvi Madan),” Grand Tamasha, December 14, 2022.

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After a short holiday break, this week we kick off the ninth season of Grand Tamasha. Milan’s guest on the show is Pranay Kotasthane, author of the new book—Missing In Action: Why You Should Care About Public Policy, co-authored with Raghu Jaitley.

What is the Indian state? How does it work? How does it fail? And how can it evolve? These are just some of the questions that this important new book tries to tackle.

Unlike most books in this genre, it is written for the proverbial man or woman on the street, refraining from jargon and acronyms to educate, and possibly even entertain, readers interested in how policy is made.

Pranay, who serves as deputy director at the Takshashila Institution in Bangalore, and Milan discuss the difference between a democracy and a republic, the role of ideology in Indian politics, pro-business vs. pro-market policies, and the enduring weakness of the Indian state. Plus, the two discuss the shrinking of the “middle” space in public discourse and what that means for the future of Indian democracy.

IVM Podcasts, Puliyabaazi (Hindi Podcast), hosted by Saurabh Chandra, Pranay Kotasthane, and Khyati Pathak.
“Anticipating the Unanticipated,” weekly Substack newsletter by Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu Jaitley.
“Missing in Action is Here,” Anticipating the Unanticipated, Number 195.

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Our Grand Tamasha top three books of 2022 (drumroll, please):

Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence

By Shrayana Bhattacharya. Published by HarperCollins India.

The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of Government

By Rahul Sagar. Published by Hurst/HarperCollins India.

The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India

By Mansi Choksi. Published by Atria/Icon/Penguin Viking.

In this episode, Milan talks about why he loved each of these books and includes short clips from his conversations with Shrayana, Rahul, and Mansi. Think of this bonus episode as our little holiday present to you, our listeners. We'll see you in January.

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“A Test of the BJP’s Dominance in Gujarat (with Mahesh Langa),” Grand Tamasha, December 6, 2022.
“Previewing India’s G20 Agenda (with Karthik Nachiappan),” Grand Tamasha, November 30, 2022.
“Congress Drama, Indian Diplomacy, and the Diaspora (with Sadanand Dhume and Tanvi Madan),” Grand Tamasha, October 12, 2022.

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Mahesh Langa, “Modest turnout of 59.11% registered in the second phase of Gujarat Assembly elections,” Hindu, December 5, 2022.
Mahesh Langa, “Congress views terrorism from prism of vote bank, says PM Modi,” Hindu, November 27, 2022.
Nistula Hebbar and Mahesh Langa, “With two Opposition firebrands of 2017 now in BJP camp, election loses its spark,” Hindu, November 23, 2022.

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Karthik Nachiappan, Does India Negotiate? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020)
Karthik Nachiappan, “The international politics of data: When control trumps protection,” Observer Research Foundation, October 26, 2022.
Arindrajit Basu and Karthik Nachiappan, “Data opportunity at the G20,” Hindu, August 18, 2022.
“How Rising Powers Can Make—Or Break—International Order” (with Rohan Mukherjee), Grand Tamasha, November 16, 2022.

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“Southern Asia's Nuclear Future with Ashley J. Tellis,” Grand Tamasha, October 26, 2022.
“India’s Future in a Changing Global Order (with Shivshankar Menon),” Grand Tamasha, February 2, 2022.

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Semafor “Climate” newsletter by Bill Spindle.
Bill Spindle, “Energy: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly,” The Energy Adventure(r) newsletter, June 14, 2022.
Bill Spindle, “The Free Power Flywheel,” The Energy Adventure(r) newsletter, August 29, 2022.
Bill Spindle, “Global climate conference threatens to be a bust,” Semafor, October 22, 2022.
“How India Can Get to Net Zero Emissions (with Jayant Sinha),” Grand Tamasha, October 13, 2021.
“What COP26 Means for India—and the World (with Navroz Dubash),” Grand Tamasha, November 17, 2021.

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“What Kind of World Power Does India Want to Be (with Rahul Sagar),” Grand Tamasha, June 1, 2022.
Rahul Sagar, To Raise a Fallen People: How Nineteenth-Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours (Juggernaut, 2022).
Ideas of India, online database curated by Rahul Sagar

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“How China Sees India With Ambassador Shyam Saran,” Grand Tamasha, September 7, 2022.
“When and Why Do India and Pakistan Fight (with Christopher Clary),” Grand Tamasha, September 14, 2022.
Ashley J. Tellis, India's Emerging Nuclear Posture: Between Recessed Deterrent and Ready Arsenal (RAND Corporation, 2001).
Ashley J. Tellis, Alison Szalwinski, and Michael Wills, eds. Strategic Asia 2019: China’s Expanding Strategic Ambitions(Washington, D.C.: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2019).

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Lamat R. Hasan, “Review: Sisterhood Economy Of, By, For Wo(men) by Shaili Chopra,” Hindustan Times, October 6, 2022.
Arunima Mazumdar, “Interview: Shaili Chopra, author, Sisterhood Economy: Of, By, For Wo(Men) - “Caste and gender inequality go hand in hand,” Hindustan Times, September 30, 2022.
“How Shah Rukh Khan Inspires Female Empowerment (with Shrayana Bhattacharya),” Grand Tamasha, December 15, 2021.

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Tanvi Madan, “China Has Lost India: How Beijing’s Aggression Pushed New Delhi to the West,” Foreign Affairs, October 4, 2022.
Sadanand Dhume, “Hindu Nationalism Threatens India’s Rise as a Nation,” Wall Street Journal, June 10, 2022.
Prashant Jha, “A story of friendship: The underlying theme of Jaishankar’s Washington DC visit,” Hindustan Times, September 30, 2022.
“Rearranging Marriage in Modern India (with Mansi Choksi),” Grand Tamasha, September 28, 2022.
Jayita Sarkar, Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022).

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Rohini Nilekani, Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar: A Citizen-First Approach (available open-access).
“Off-the-Cuff with Rohini Nilekani,” ThePrint, September 9, 2022.
“How to Fix India’s Water Crisis (with Mridula Ramesh),”Grand Tamasha, March 23, 2022.

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Mansi Choksi, “How ‘Love Commandos’ Help Young Lovers Cross Caste Lines,” Literary Hub, September 6, 2022.
Mansi Choksi, “‘Did You Feel a Fire Between Us?’” Slate, August 30, 2022.
“How Shah Rukh Khan Inspires Female Empowerment,” (with Shrayana Bhattacharya), Grand Tamasha, December 15, 2021.
“Neha Sahgal on Religion and Identity in Contemporary India,” Grand Tamasha, June 30, 2021.
“Rachel Brulé on Gender Quotas and Gender Inequality in India,” Grand Tamasha, May 26, 2021.
Snigdha Poonam, Dreamers: How Young Indians Are Changing the World (Harvard University Press, 2018).

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In country after country in South Asia, we are seeing worrying signs of economic turmoil and political upheaval. Earlier this year, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan lost a bruising no-confidence vote, resulting in his abrupt ouster. But now the new coalition government that took over from Khan is struggling under the weight of a rising debt burden.

Sri Lanka has experienced a full-blown crisis, resulting in Asia’s first default in decades and the collapse of the Rajapaksa government.

While India’s economic prospects remain relatively positive, there too there are concerns about how widely the gains of recent economic growth are being shared.

To discuss South Asia’s economic outlook, journalist Benjamin Parkin joins Milan on the show this week. Ben is the South Asia correspondent for the Financial Times based in New Delhi and has previously worked with Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.

The two discuss the external headwinds, domestic policy missteps, and continued uncertainty plaguing South Asian economies from Afghanistan to Bangladesh. They also discuss how China is using the present moment to press its advantage and how the West is responding. Plus, the two talk about India’s economic trajectory and sharply divided views on its recovery.

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“Pallavi Raghavan on an Alternative History of India-Pakistan Relations,” Grand Tamasha, April 7, 2020.
Brian Finlay, “The Passing of Our Co-Founder Michael Krepon,” Henry L. Stimson Center, July 16, 2022.
“Myra MacDonald on the India-Pakistan Battle for Siachen,” Grand Tamasha, March 9, 2021.

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Shyam Saran, “Signs of Twin Troubles in China,” Business Standard, August 17, 2022.
Shyam Saran, “Why India@75 Must Pay Attention to Fault Lines,” Mint, August 15, 2022.
“India’s Future in a Changing Global Order (with Shivshankar Menon),” Grand Tamasha, February 2, 2022.

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This season, in twenty episodes, Grand Tamasha has covered a lot of ground—from the war in Ukraine, to the UP elections, and India’s water crisis. We will be taking a little break to recharge our batteries, but we will be back in August with all-new Grand Tamasha content.

To bring the curtains down on the seventh season of Grand Tamasha, Milan is joined on the podcast by podcast regulars, Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution.

The trio discusses the foreign policy crisis which engulfed India last week after two BJP spokespersons made statements criticizing the Prophet Mohammed; the 180-degree turn in popular perceptions of India’s stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and how India was received at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.

Plus, the three offer their summer reading recommendations for India policy enthusiasts.

Sadanand Dhume, “Hindu Nationalism Threatens India’s Rise as a Nation,” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2022.
Shoaib Daniyal, “The India Fix,” Scroll.in.
Carnegie India, “Ideas and Institutions,” Carnegie India.
Ananth Krishnan, “The India-China Newsletter.”
Suyash Desai, “The PLA Bulletin.”
Manoj Kewalramani, “Eye on China,” Takshashila Institution.

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In 2014, soon after coming to power, the Narendra Modi government decided to abolish India’s decades-old Planning Commission, replacing it with a new government think tank meant to facilitate cooperative federalism. For years, the Planning Commission devised detailed, five-year, central plans meant to guide India’s economy and allocate funds from the center to India’s states.

Eight years later, the Planning Commission may be gone, but it is not forgotten. A new book by the University of Notre Dame historian Nikhil Menon, Planning Democracy: How a Professor, An Institute, and an Idea Shaped India, provides a wide-ranging history of the marriage between liberal democracy and a socialist economy, uncovering the way planning came to define not just the economy but the nation itself.

Nikhil is Milan’s guest on the show this week. They talk about the legacy of India’s planning infrastructure, the unique influence of pioneering statistician P.C. Mahalanobis, and the ways in which India’s statistical architecture was the envy of the world. Plus, the two discuss the decline of planning, the vestiges that carry on today, and India’s weakened data institutions.

“India’s once-vaunted statistical infrastructure is crumbling,” Economist, May 19, 2022.
Nikhil Menon, “A short history of data,” Hindu, March 21, 2019
Pramit Bhattacharya, “How India’s Statistical System Was Crippled,” Mint, May 7, 2019.

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What kind of world power does India want to be? Few questions have been asked as often or as intensely since India’s economic take-off in the early 1990s and the corresponding rise in its foreign policy ambitions.

Many of our intellectual debates seek answers to this question by looking back to the dawn of independence in 1947. A new book by political scientist Rahul Sagar, To Raise a Fallen People: How Nineteenth Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours, invites readers to look even further back to the oft-forgotten, raucous debates of the 19th century.

Rahul joins Milan on the podcast this week to talk about his new book and the intellectual roots of India’s strategic thought. Milan and Rahul discuss the debate over India’s strategic culture, its “half-hearted” approach to great power politics, and the salience of 19th-century debates for understanding the current foreign policy discourse on Russia-Ukraine.

Rahul Sagar, “If it doesn’t learn from the past, the West can lose India (again),” Times of India, May 22, 2022.
Rahul Sagar, The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao's Hints on the Art and Science of Government (London: Hurst, 2022).
Rahul Sagar, “‘Jiski Lathi, Uski Bhains’: The Hindu Nationalist View of International Politics,” in Kanti Bajpai, Saira Basit, and V. Krishnappa, eds., India’s Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases (New Delhi: Routledge, 2016).

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Over the weekend, Australian voters elected a new government with the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and Anthony Albanese at the helm, ousting the ruling Liberal-National Coalition for the first time in a decade. Key to the ALP’s landmark victory was the vote of the Indo-Australians, now the second-largest immigrant group in Australia.

A new Carnegie study co-authored by Devesh Kapur, Caroline Duckworth, and our very own Milan Vaishnav, sheds light on three elements of the Indo-Australian community’s political behaviour: the community’s political preferences, leadership preferences, and policy priorities.

This week, we put Milan in the hot seat to discuss his new study along with Caroline Duckworth, a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow in Carnegie’s South Asia Program. We also wanted to turn the tables on Milan to ask him about his recent trip to Delhi—his first in the COVID era. We talk about India’s ongoing heatwave, the political mood in the country, and the fractures in Indian federalism.

Caroline Duckworth, Devesh Kapur, and Milan Vaishnav, “Indo-Australian Voters and the 2022 General Election,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 18, 2022.
Jonathan Kay, “A Heat Wave Has Pushed India’s Dysfunctional Power System Into a Crisis,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 12, 2022.

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Sri Lanka has been the site of dramatic economic and political upheaval over the past several weeks as years of economic mismanagement have resulted in rampant inflation, shortages of essential commodities, and the country’s first sovereign default in the post-independence era.

The island’s dire economic conditions have spurred angry, and sometimes violent, protests which resulted in the sudden resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and continued calls for the resignation of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the country’s president and the prime minister’s brother.

To discuss the economic and political causes and consequences of this crisis, Milan is joined on the show this week by political economist Ahilan Kadirgamar. Ahilan is Senior Lecturer at the University of Jaffna and one of Sri Lanka’s leading political economists.

Ahilan and Milan discuss the tense situation on the ground, the economic roots of the current crisis, and the prospects for a return to wide-scale violence. Plus, the two discuss India’s role in extending an economic lifeline to Sri Lanka and whether the island nation can put a decades-old legacy of ethnic strife behind it.

“Rethinking Sri Lanka’s economic crisis,” Interview with Ahilan Kadirgamar, Himal South Asian, February 28, 2022.
Ahilan Kadirgamar, “Polarization, Civil War, and Persistent Majoritarianism in Sri Lanka,” in Thomas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue, eds., Political Polarization in South and Southeast Asia: Old Divisions, New Dangers (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2020).
Ahilan Kadirgamar, "Sri Lanka stares at bankruptcy or redemption," The Hindu, April 16, 2022.
Ahilan Kadirgamar. "The Political Economy of the Crisis in Sri Lanka," Economic & Political Weekly, April 30, 2022.

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Nayanima Basu, “Modi’s trip shows India & EU can grow closer despite differences on Russia’s Ukraine invasion,” ThePrint, May 6, 2022.
Garima Mohan and Thorsten Benner, “Look More at India!” Der Spiegel, May 2, 2022.
Sreemoy Talukdar, “An assessment of EU-India ties as Modi visits Europe: Sheer political will driving strategic convergence beyond differences,” Firstpost, May 4, 2022.

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Aqil Shah, “The Shambolic End of Imran Khan,” Foreign Affairs, April 15, 2022.
Aqil Shah, “Pakistan’s ‘Moderate Taliban’ Strategy Won’t Hold Up—For Anyone,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 30, 2021.
Aqil Shah, “Pakistan: Voting Under Military Tutelage,” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 1 (2019): 128-142.

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Joshua T. White, After the foundational agreements: An agenda for US-India defense and security cooperation(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2021)
Joshua T. White, “Nonstate threats in the Taliban’s Afghanistan,” February 1, 2022, Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2022/02/01/nonstate-threats-in-the-talibans-afghanistan/
Ashley J. Tellis, “‘What Is in Our Interest’: India and the Ukraine War,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 25, 2022.

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“Information Politics and Social Change,” Ideas of India (podcast) with Shruti Rajagopalan and Rajesh Veeraraghavan, March 3, 2022.
Philip Keefer and Stuti Khemani, “Why Do the Poor Receive Poor Services?” Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 9 (2004): 935-943.
Diego Maiorano, “The Politics of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Andhra Pradesh,” World Development 58 (2014): 95-105.

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Sugata Srinivasaraju, “Balancing Opinion And Diverting Attention,” New Indian Express, April 7, 2022.
Soutik Biswas, “Bangalore: How polarisation is dividing India's Silicon Valley,” BBC, April 7, 2022.
Pooja Prasanna, “Karnataka’s Hindutva hate politics: Blame it on a weak CM and an edgy Opposition,” TheNews Minute, April 6, 2022.

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Christine Hall, “GlobalWonks relaunches as Enquire AI following $5.5M round,” TechCrunch, December 15, 2021.
Bilal Baloch, “10 years later, assessing UPA’s response to IAC,” Hindustan Times, December 11, 2021.
Sandip Sukhtankar and Milan Vaishnav, “Corruption in India: Bridging Research
Evidence and Policy Options,” India Policy Forum 11: 193-276.

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Sadanand Dhume, “India Has a Lot to Lose in Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2022.
Tanvi Madan, “India is Not Sitting on the Geopolitical Fence,” War on the Rocks, October 27, 2021.
“India's High-Wire Act on Russia-Ukraine,” (with Raji Rajagopalan), Grand Tamasha, March 2, 2022.

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Chanpreet Khurana, “Mridula Ramesh: "Business leaders exist on a spectrum on 'water/climate awareness',” Moneycontrol, February 20, 2022.
“What COP26 Means for India—and the World,” (with Navroz Dubash), Grand Tamasha, November 17, 2021.
“How India Can Get to Net Zero Emissions,” (with Jayant Sinha), Grand Tamasha, October 13, 2021.

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Mirza Asmer Beg, Shashikant Pandey, and Shreyas Sardesai, “The BJP’s rock solid social coalition,” Hindu, March 12, 2022.
Rahul Verma, “Grand Old Party and Its Grand Illusions,” Times of India, March 13, 2022.

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Sajjid Chinoy, “Managing the crude price pressure,” Indian Express, March 4, 2022.
Sajjid Chinoy, “4 choices, no free lunch: Budget attempted a balancing act in a complex domestic & global macro environment,” Times of India, February 3, 2022.
“Breaking Down India’s Budget,” (with Roshan Kishore), Grand Tamasha, February 16, 2022.
Sajjid Chinoy and Toshi Jain, “India’s 4Q21 GDP underwhelms, underscoring the pandemic’s scars,” J.P. Morgan, February 28, 2022.

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Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, “Why Did Russian President Putin Visit India?” Observer Research Foundation, December 15, 2021.
Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, “India’s Place in the New U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy,” Observer Research Foundation, February 24, 2021.
Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, “Putin and Xi Frame a New China-Russia Partnership,” Observer Research Foundation, February 15, 2021.
“The Looming Cloud of Sanctions Over U.S.-India Relations,” (with Sameer Lalwani), Grand Tamasha, September 29, 2021.

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“Episode 262: Nehru’s Debates,” (with Adeel Hussain and Tripurdaman Singh), The Seen and The Unseen (podcast), January 31, 2022.
Tripurdaman Singh, Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment of the Constitution of India.
“Madhav Khosla on India’s Founding Moment,” Grand Tamasha, January 29, 2020.

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Roshan Kishore, “Math of the economy: How to understand the Budget,” Hindustan Times, February 2, 2022.
Roshan Kishore, “Three questions which capture India’s medium-term economic challenge,” Hindustan Times, February 3, 2022.
Poonam Gupta, “Budget steers clear of drama in complex economic environment,” Economic Times, February 2, 2022.
Rohit Lamba and Raghuram Rajan, “Don’t Mimic China’s Economic Model,” Times of India, February 15, 2022.

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K.X. Ronnie, “Interview, Shrayana Bhattacharya, author, Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh – “I’m a loud and proud feminist economist,” Hindustan Times, November 27, 2021.
Devesh Kapur, Neelanjan Sircar, and Milan Vaishnav, “Introduction to e-Symposium: Urbanisation, gender, and social change in north India,” Ideas for India, December 6, 2021.
Milan Vaishnav, “Women and work: How much does measurement matter?” Ideas for India, May 10, 2021.
Ruth Pollard, “What a Bollywood Megastar Means for Women in India,” Bloomberg, December 9, 2021.

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India’s Path to Power: Strategy in a World Adrift, Centre for Policy Research and Takshashila Institution.
“The Biden-Modi Summit and the Future of U.S.-India Relations” (with Ashley Tellis), Grand Tamasha, September 22, 2021.

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Sukumar Ranganathan, “In 2022, what India must do to learn to live with Covid,” Hindustan Times, December 11, 2021.
“Anup Malani on India’s COVID Second Wave,” Grand Tamasha, April 27, 2021.
“Niha Masih on Reporting on India's COVID-19 Crisis,” Grand Tamasha,June 16, 2021

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Lant Pritchett, “Is India a Flailing State?: Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization,” Harvard Kennedy School.
Shruti Rajagopalan and Alex Tabarrok, “Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State,” The Independent Review.
Keshava Guha, “In Farmers vs Modi, A Big Lesson For Congress,” NDTV.com.
Amit Varma, “Narendra Modi Takes a Great Leap Backwards,” Times of India.
Amit Varma, “#9: Why Are My Episodes so Long?” The India Uncut Newsletter.
Emergent Ventures, Mercatus Center at George Mason University.
“The Seen and The Unseen” book project.
Amit Varma, “We Are Fighting Two Disasters: Covid-19 and the Indian State,” Times of India.
Amit Varma, “Lessons from an Ankhon Dekhi Prime Minister,” Times of India.
W.S. Merwin, “Separation.”

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K.X. Ronnie, “Interview, Shrayana Bhattacharya, author, Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh – “I’m a loud and proud feminist economist,” Hindustan Times, November 27, 2021.
Devesh Kapur, Neelanjan Sircar, and Milan Vaishnav, “Introduction to e-Symposium: Urbanisation, gender, and social change in north India,” Ideas for India, December 6, 2021.
Milan Vaishnav, “Women and work: How much does measurement matter?” Ideas for India, May 10, 2021.
Ruth Pollard, “What a Bollywood Megastar Means for Women in India,” Bloomberg, December 9, 2021.

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“Pallavi Raghavan on an Alternative History of India-Pakistan Relations,” Grand Tamasha, April 7, 2020.
“Modi's Farm Law Reversal, India-China, and Trade Policy,” Grand Tamasha, November 23, 2021.
“Kanti Bajpai on Why China and India Are Not Friends,” Grand Tamasha, July 6, 2021.
C. Raja Mohan, “Nirupama Rao’s latest book, The Fractured Himalaya, is a lucid account of Sino-Indian relations,” Indian Express, November 7, 2021.

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In September 2020, India’s Parliament passed three farm reform bills that the government claimed would radically change the way in which agriculture was practised in the country. Yet, just over twelve months later, the same government announced its intention to repeal those laws—a major concession to large-scale, dogged protests launched by farmers in northern India.

The repeal of the farm reform laws, hailed by many observers as a short-term victory for struggling farmers, has also raised complex questions about the future of agriculture in a rapidly urbanizing India. To consider some of these questions, Milan is joined on the podcast this week by Harish Damodaran. Harish is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi where he is enjoying a sabbatical from his day job as National Rural Affairs and Agriculture Editor at The Indian Express.

Harish and Milan talk about the state of Indian agriculture, the motivations behind the farm reform laws, and the complex reasons the government eventually withdrew them. Plus, the two discuss the next stage of farmers’ demands and what this setback does to the larger push for agrarian reform.

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We are nearly done with our sixth season of Grand Tamasha and we have been shamefully overdue in scheduling a news round-up for the Fall.

To set things straight and to discuss the latest news coming out of India, Milan is joined on the podcast this week by Grand Tamasha regulars Sadanand Dhume of AEI and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution.

The three discuss the Modi government’s abrupt about-turn on the farm law bills, the perilous state of China-India relations, and new murmurs out of Delhi on the trade policy front. Plus, Tanvi, Sadanand, and Milan discuss three stories coming out of India that podcast regulars should be following.

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Jayant Sinha, “How India Can Get to Net Zero Emissions,” Grand Tamasha, October 12, 2021.
Navroz Dubash, “Understanding India’s climate pledges,” Hindustan Times, November 12, 2021.
Navroz Dubash, “Unlocking climate action in Indian federalism,” Hindustan Times, August 11, 2021.

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Mukulika Banerjee, “Elections as Communitas,” Social Research, Spring 2011.
Mukulika Banerjee, “A small ‘feastie’ in a Republic’s anniversary,” Indian Express, January 26, 2020.
Pradeep K. Chhibber and Amit Ahuja, “Why the Poor Vote in India: 'If I Don't Vote, I Am Dead to the State,’” Studies in International Comparative Development, 2012.
Christophe Jaffrelot, “Narendra Modi and India's New Political System,” Grand Tamasha, October 5, 2021.

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“Rahul Pandita on Kashmir: ‘You can leave Kashmir but Kashmir never leaves you,’” Grand Tamasha, August 29, 2021.
Adrian Levy, “Inside the Secret World of South Asia's Spies,” Grand Tamasha, October 26, 2021.
Rahul Pandita, “Kashmir’s New Insurgency,” Open Magazine, October 22, 2021.
Rahul Pandita, “The Usual Suspects,” Open Magazine, September 10, 2021.

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“What the Taliban Takeover Means for India,” Grand Tamasha, September 14, 2021.
Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, The Siege: The Attack on the Taj (Penguin, 2013).
Aqil Shah, “How Will the Taliban Deal With Other Islamic Extremist Groups?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, August 31, 2021.

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“Niha Masih on Reporting on India’s COVID-19 Crisis,” Grand Tamasha, June 15, 2021.
Joanna Slater and Niha Masih, “The spyware is sold to governments to fight terrorism. In India, it was used to hack journalists and others,” Washington Post, July 19, 2021.
Joanna Slater and Shams Irfan, “Inside a Delhi hospital, oxygen runs fatally short as covid cases mount,” Washington Post, April 24, 2021.
Niha Masih and Joanna Slater, “They were accused of plotting to overthrow the Modi government. The evidence was planted, a new report says,” Washington Post, February 10, 2021.
Joanna Slater, “A young Indian couple married for love. Then the bride’s father hired assassins,” Washington Post, August 19, 2019.
Joanna Slater, “In Modi’s move on Kashmir, a road map for his ‘new India,’” Washington Post, August 15, 2019.
Joanna Slater, “In the world’s biggest election, India’s Narendra Modi pushes fear over hope,” Washington Post, April 11, 2019.

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Chloe Farand, “Indian lawmaker submits private bill to achieve net zero emissions by 2050,” Climate Home News, March 18, 2021.
Jayant Sinha, “India's search for greener pastures should end in a climate change law,” Economic Times, March 10, 2021
Jayant Sinha et al., Getting to the Green Frontier, Observer Research Foundation, 2020.
Jayant Sinha and Anshu Bhardwaj, “The many paths to a greener future,” Business Standard, July 22, 2021

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Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil, India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-77 (Oxford University Press, 2021).
Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Christophe Jaffrelot, eds., Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (Oxford University Press, 2019).
“Christophe Jaffrelot on India’s First Dictatorship,” Grand Tamasha, April 13, 2021.

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Sameer Lalwani, “What India can do to avoid US sanctions over Russia,” Hindustan Times, September 22, 2021.
Sameer Lalwani, “Strategizing to Exit Afghanistan: From Risk Avoidance to Risk Management,” War on the Rocks, March 29, 2021.
Sameer Lalwani and Tyler Sagerstrom, “What the India–Russia Defence Partnership Means for US Policy,” Survival (2021).
Sameer Lalwani, Frank O’Donnell, Tyler Sagerstrom, and Akriti Vasudeva, “The Influence of Arms: Explaining the Durability of India–Russia Alignment,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, January 15, 2021.
Sameer Lalwani, “America Can’t Ignore the Next Indo-Pakistani Crisis,” War on the Rocks, February 26, 2021.
Ashley J. Tellis, “The Biden-Modi Summit and the Future of U.S.-India Relations,” Grand Tamasha, September 21, 2021.

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Evan S. Medeiros and Ashley J. Tellis, “Regime Change Is Not an Option in China,” Foreign Affairs, July 8, 2021.
Ashley J. Tellis, “Well Begun Is Half Done? Managing U.S.-India Relations,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 27, 2021.
Ashley J. Tellis interview with Karan Thapar, “Taliban Win Big Setback for India but India’s Importance for US Has Sharply Increased,”The Wire, September 7, 2021.

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Avinash Paliwal, “A strategic shock for the subcontinent,” Hindustan Times, August 25, 2021.

Stephanie Findlay and Amy Kazmin, “Taliban cabinet shows west has little leverage over Afghanistan’s new rulers,” Financial Times, September 8, 2021.

Devirupa Mitra, “India's New Visa Policy for Afghans Is in Limbo, Leaving Thousands Tense,” The Wire, September 7, 2021.

Amy Kazmin, “Taliban mount charm offensive to win Afghans’ trust,” Financial Times, September 3, 2021.

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Grand Tamasha, “Darshana Baruah on the Indian Ocean Imperative,” April 6, 2021
Grand Tamasha, “Ananth Krishnan on What China’s Rise Means for India,” October 20, 2020
Grand Tamasha, “Ashley J. Tellis on India’s China Conundrum,” September 22, 2020
“Off the Cuff with Kanti Bajpai,” ThePrint
Kanti Bajpai, “Why does China consistently beat India on soft power?” Indian Express, June 23, 2021

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Over the last two-and-a-half years, Milan and his guests have spent a lot of time on the podcast talking about some of the biggest questions facing Indian society. What is driving an increase in religious nationalism? To what extent is religious intolerance on the rise? Is caste morphing from a marker of hierarchy to a marker of difference? And, what if anything, does it mean to be truly Indian?

These are just some of the questions a landmark new study by the Pew Research Center—released today—asks and answers, drawing on an important new survey of religion, identity, and belonging. On the show this week, Milan is joined by Neha Sahgal, associate director of research at Pew and one of the lead investigators of this new work.

Milan and Neha discuss the coexistence of religious tolerance and religious segregation in India, the salience of caste identity and Hindu nationalism, and the evidence for “secularization theory.” Plus, the two discuss why South India is an outlier in many respects and what larger lessons the study holds for Indian democracy.

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Note: Milan’s interview with Arora Akanksha took place on June 18. On June 19, the United Nations General Assembly formally approved a second term for the incumbent António Guterres—officially bringing the selection process to a close.

Earlier this month, the United Nations Security Council recommended the reelection of António Guterres as secretary-general, virtually assuring the Portuguese leader a second term at the helm of one of the world’s most consequential bodies.

But not everyone is standing by to coronate Mr. Guterres. Arora Akanksha—a Canadian citizen of Indian heritage—is running an insurgent campaign to unseat the incumbent Secretary-General. Her campaign has attracted attention—not only for its boldness—but also because Ms. Akanksha has spent the last several years toiling inside the UN and has been unafraid to call out its shortcomings from within.

Arora joins Milan on the podcast this week. The two of them discuss her north Indian roots, circuitous path to the UN, and unlikely decision to run for the UN’s top job. Plus, the two discuss Arora’s diagnosis of what ails the UN and her priorities for reform.

Rick Gladstone, “Who Is Arora Akanksha, the 34-Year-Old Running for U.N. Secretary General?” New York Times
Adam Iscoe, “On the Secret Campaign Trail to Lead the U.N.” New Yorker
Stephanie Fillion, “A Millennial UN Staffer Who Is Daring to Run Against Secretary-General António Guterres,” PassBlue

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Niha Masih, “My whole family was infected in India’s devastating coronavirus surge. Not all survived,” Washington Post
Niha Masih and Taniya Dutta, “As India’s pandemic surge eases, a race begins to prepare for a possible next wave,” Washington Post
Niha Masih, “India’s coronavirus crisis spreads to its villages, where health care is hard to find,” Washington Post
Joanna Slater, Niha Masih, and Shams Irfan, “In an Indian city, obituaries reveal missing coronavirus deaths and untold suffering,” Washington Post
Joanna Slater and Niha Masih, “In India’s devastating coronavirus surge, anger at Modi grows,” Washington Post
Milan Vaishnav, “Will voters hold Modi to account for India’s covid-19 crisis? Don’t bet on it,” Washington Post
“Sadanand Dhume and Tanvi Madan on the political and foreign policy ramifications of India's COVID second wave,” Grand Tamasha
“Samanth Subramanian on India’s Vaccine Conundrum,” Grand Tamasha
“Anup Malani on India’s COVID Second Wave,” Grand Tamasha

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A troubling surge in hate crimes and discrimination targeting Asian Americans has hit the headlines in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The violence has cast a newfound spotlight on the bigotry many Asian immigrant populations experience in the United States.

While Indian Americans have not borne the brunt of the discrimination of the COVID era, the community is no stranger to prejudice. A new study by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Johns Hopkins-SAIS, and the University of Pennsylvania looks at the question of discrimination and the broader social realities of the Indian diaspora of the United States.

Milan is a co-author of this study, and this week he sits down with his fellow co-authors—Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, and Jonathan Kay—to discuss the report’s findings. They discuss the degree of everyday discrimination Indian Americans face, the connection between polarization in India and divisions in the United States, and the ways in which divides in the diaspora could affect U.S.-India relations. Plus, the group reflects on larger issues of identity, social networks, and belonging in the Indian diaspora.

Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, Jonathan Kay, and Milan Vaishnav, “Social Realities of Indian Americans: Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey”
Grand Tamasha, “Sumitra Badrinathan and Devesh Kapur Decode the 2020 Indian American Vote”
Grand Tamasha, “Sumitra Badrinathan and Devesh Kapur on How Indian Americans View India”
Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, and Milan Vaishnav, “How Will Indian Americans Vote? Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey”
Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, and Milan Vaishnav, “How Do Indian Americans View India? Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey”

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Sadanand Dhume, “Modi Declared Victory, Then Covid Struck Back With a Vengeance,” Wall Street Journal
Sadanand Dhume, “India’s Second Covid Wave Recedes. Will a Third One Sweep In?” Wall Street Journal
Dhruva Jaishankar and Tanvi Madan, “How the Quad Can Match the Hype,” Foreign Affairs

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Rachel Brulé and Nikhar Gaikwad, “Culture, Capital and the Political Economy Gender Gap: Evidence from Meghalaya’s Matrilineal Tribes,” Journal of Politics
Rachel Brulé, “Reform, Representation & Resistance: The Politics of Property Rights’ Enforcement,” Journal of Politics
Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

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Samanth Subramanian, “In the push for new vaccines, taxpayers keep paying and paying,” Quartz.
Samanth Subramanian, “The US’ support for vaccine patent waivers still leaves plenty to be resolved,” Quartz.
Samanth Subramanian, “Why is India, the world’s largest vaccine producer, running short of vaccines?” Quartz.
Samanth Subramanian, “India is feeling all the pain—and none of the gain—of an undeclared lockdown,” Quartz.

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More than fifteen years ago, India’s parliament passed a sweeping piece of legislation known as the Right to Information Act—a law that transforms the way ordinary citizens access the inner workings of government, offering them an unprecedented glimpse into how policy is made, how funds are allocated, and how interests are served.

A new book by the political scientist Himanshu Jha, Capturing Institutional Change: The Case of the Right to Information Act, asks a seemingly simple question: why would a state that is so deeply penetrated by vested interests, initiate a far-reaching process of reform that would expose the very special interests who have benefited from opacity in the first place?

This week on the podcast, Milan sits down with Himanshu, who is a lecturer and research fellow in the Department of Political Science at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University. The two talk about the domestic and foreign origins of law, the implementation challenges it has faced, the ways in which it has challenged vested interests, and how the government has tried to undermine transparency.

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On Sunday, the highly anticipated results from five state assembly elections across India were announced. These results come at a time of great uncertainty in India as the country is in the throes of a devastating second wave of the coronavirus, which is racking up nearly 400,000 new cases every day.

To help make sense of these elections and how they fit into the broader Indian political landscape, this week on the show Milan speaks with veteran journalist Aditi Phadnis, political editor at the Business Standard. Aditi and Milan discuss the reasons behind Mamata Banerjee’s decisive victory in West Bengal, the Left’s historic showing in Kerala, the BJP’s win in Assam, and the DMK’s comeback in Tamil Nadu. Plus, the two discuss the implications of this election for Indian federalism, governance, and the popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Episode notes:

Milan Vaishnav, “Will voters hold Modi to account for India’s covid-19 crisis? Don’t bet on it,” Washington Post

Neelanjan Sircar, “The Bengal model to counter the BJP,” Hindustan Times

Aditi Phadnis, “It's BJP again in Assam, but who will be the next chief minister?” Business Standard

Aditi Phadnis, “Going gets tougher for Modi govt as election results favour Opposition,” Business Standard

Aditi Phadnis, “Mamata Banerjee's wheelchair stops the BJP juggernaut in West Bengal,” Business Standard

Aditi Phadnis, “National politics set to change as Mamata Banerjee keeps West Bengal,” Business Standard

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This week on Grand Tamasha, Anup Malani joined Milan to discuss the coronavirus surge in India, including the effectiveness of lockdowns, the causes of the surge, and the role vaccine nationalism has played in getting supplies to India.

It has been a harrowing week for India. The country is reeling under the effects of a devastating second wave of the coronavirus, which is responsible for more than 300,000 new cases a day and more than 2,000 fatalities. And these official numbers are almost certainly a dramatic undercount.

To understand what is driving this new second wave of the virus and the global health implications of the surge, professor Anup Malani joins Milan on the show this week. Anup is the Lee and Brena Freeman professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a professor at the Pritzker School of Medicine.

Anup and Milan discuss India’s second COVID wave—what we know, what we don’t know, and what we need to find out. Plus, they discuss the findings of numerous serological studies Anup and his co-authors have conducted across India, the contested role of lockdowns, and the worrying prospect of vaccine nationalism.

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This month, voters are going to the polls in five Indian states to select the members of their respective state assemblies. These polls are being seen as a test of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popularity and the ability of the Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to grow or further consolidate its popularity in the eastern and southern parts of the country.

Election results will be announced on May 2 but, before then, we will hear from a litany of exit polls that will try to predict the outcomes of these five contests. The exit polls conducted by Axis My India will among the most eagerly anticipated. The firm has garnered a reputation for accurately predicting a spate of recent elections across India. Milan’s guest on the show this week is Pradeep Gupta, the Chairman and Managing Director of Axis My India and author of the brand-new book, How India Votes: And What It Means.

Milan and Pradeep discuss why it is so hard to conduct election surveys in India, why Indian voters are delivering more decisive mandates of late, and how Narendra Modi has established a unique connection with Indian voters. Plus, the two discuss the state of the political opposition and how Modi was able to turn demonetization, a questionable economic policy measure, into a big political winner.

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This week on Grand Tamasha, Christophe Jaffrelot joined Milan to discuss Emergency Rule in 1970s India and the parallels between the political structures then and now.

Most people who work on India regularly refer to India as the world’s largest democracy and the most enduring democracy in the developing world. However, they often have to footnote such statements with the caveat that India experienced a twenty-one-month period of Emergency Rule in the late 1970s during which democracy was placed in cold storage.

A new book, India’s First Dictatorship--The Emergency 1975-1977, by Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil breaks new ground in providing us with a comprehensive history and political analysis of this exceptional period. Christophe joins Milan on the show this week to discuss why the Emergency was imposed, how it was imposed, and why—in the end—it was undone. Plus, the two talk about talk about parallels between the political power structure in India circa the late 1970s and today.

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Few regions of the world have gotten more attention in the first few months of the Biden administration than Asia. And, within Asia, top leaders from Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to President Joe Biden himself have singled out the importance of the Indo-Pacific region in particular.

To discuss why this region has gotten such significant air-time and to help us understand what shape greater power competition might take there, Darshana Baruah joins Milan on the podcast this week. Darshana is an associate fellow with the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where she leads Carnegie’s new Indian Ocean Initiative.

Darshana and Milan discuss the strategic importance of the Indian Ocean, India’s evolving views toward the “Quad,” and how the United States and India might cooperate in this critical region. Plus, the two discuss China’s strategic motivations and the existential issue of climate change for the region’s small island nations.

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Joe Biden, Narendra Modi, Scott Morrison and Yoshihide Suga, “Our four nations are committed to a free, open, secure and prosperous Indo-Pacific region,” Washington Post
Milan Vaishnav, “The Decay of Indian Democracy,” Foreign Affairs
Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, and Milan Vaishnav, “How Do Indian Americans View India? Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

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Jairam Ramesh is Milan’s guest on the show this week. The two discuss Ramesh’s approach to biography writing, Menon’s inscrutable personality, his status as Nehru’s “soulmate,” and his lasting legacy for Indian foreign policy. Plus, the two discuss Menon’s contemporary relevance as India stares down the possibility of another conflict with China over their contested border.

Menon is, in many ways, one of the most consequential figures in post-Independence India and he is the subject of a recent book by the politician and author Jairam Ramesh, titled: A Chequered Brilliance: The Many Lives of V.K. Krishna Menon. The book was awarded the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay-New India Foundation (NIF) Book Prize for 2020.

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The contested borders between India, China, and Pakistan render the Himalayas one of the world’s most dangerous geopolitical flashpoints in the year 2021. A new book by the journalist Myra MacDonald, White as the Shroud: India, Pakistan and War on the Frontiers of Kashmir, takes readers inside the long-simmering conflict over the Siachen glacier—one of the most obscure and forbidding battlegrounds in the world.

Myra joins Milan on the podcast this week to talk about her new book and its larger implications for regional and global politics. The two discuss Myra’s lifelong passion for India/South Asia, the origins of India and Pakistan’s decades-long battle for Siachen, and the toll war at 20,000 feet takes on soldiers from both sides. Plus, Myra reflects on how the Modi government’s August 2019 abrogation of Article 370in Jammu and Kashmir has impacted relations with both China and Pakistan.

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To discuss the farm laws—the motivations behind them, their likely consequences, and the political fallout—Milan sits down with two experts on Indian agriculture, Shoumitro Chatterjee of Penn State University and Mekhala Krishnamurthy of Ashoka University and the Centre for Policy Research.

The three discuss the state of Indian agriculture, the motivations behind the new laws, the anxieties that have fueled the protests, and possible compromises that can resolve the current impasse. If you have been watching the protests in India unfold but are struggling to make sense of them, this episode will help you fill in the blanks.

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One night in the summer of 2014, two teenage girls living in a remote village in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh went missing. Hours later, they were found dead and hanging from a tree in a mango orchard. A media frenzy ensued that propelled the case to the front pages of national newspapers and prime time cable news. It was quickly decided that this was another clear-cut case of rape and murder in India’s heartland.

A haunting new book, The Good Girls: An Ordinary Killing, by the author Sonia Faleiro reveals that the truth, however, is far murkier.
Sonia is Milan’s guest on the podcast this week and the two discuss the origins of The Good Girls, the notion of honor in contemporary Indian society, the pervasiveness of caste in the Hindi heartland, the troubled state of policing, and the battle Indian girls face even before leaving their homes.

Parul Sehgal of the New York Times has this to say about The Good Girls: “‘The Good Girls’ is transfixing; it has the pacing and mood of a whodunit, but no clear reveal; Faleiro does not indict the cruelty or malice of any individual, nor any particular system. She indicts something even more common, and in its own way far more pernicious: a culture of indifference that allowed for the neglect of the girls in life and in death.”

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As a new administration takes office in Washington, followers of the U.S.-India relationship are eagerly anticipating what shape ties between these two nations will take under a new president. A new book by the journalist Meenakshi Ahamed, A Matter of Trust: India–US Relations from Truman to Trump, offers a sweeping portrait of this relationship over seven decades. This week on the show, Milan sits down with Ahamed to discuss the evolution of U.S.-India relations, from the moment of independence in 1947 to Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. The two discuss Nehru’s perennial skepticism of America, Bill Clinton’s lifelong fascination with India, and how China’s recent actions have given the partnership an unprecedented boost.

A Matter Of Trust: India-US Relations from Truman to Trump

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Indian Americans are now the second-largest immigrant group in the United States. Their growing political influence and their courtship by the Indian government raises important—as yet unanswered—questions. How do Indians in America regard India, and how do they remain connected to developments there? What are their attitudes toward Indian politics and changes underway in their ancestral homeland? And what role, if any, do they envision for the United States in engaging with India? This week on the show, Milan sits down with his co-authors Sumitra Badrinathan and Devesh Kapur to unveil the findings of a new report they’ve authored on how Indian Americans view India. Milan, Sumitra, and Devesh discuss what their new data tells us about Indian Americans remain connected to their ancestral homeland, how they assess the performance of Narendra Modi, and how they view India’s democratic trajectory. Plus, the trio talk about what a more divided diaspora might mean for U.S.-India relations and India’s foreign policy in the years to come.

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On Monday, the Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented one of the most highly anticipated Indian budgets in recent memory. Facing a global health pandemic, a severe economic slowdown, and continued anxieties over inflation, some commentators argued that this budget was not simply the most important of the Modi government’s tenure, it was one of the most important in three decades.

To breakdown this year’s budget and to kick off the fifth season of Grand Tamasha, Milan was joined by Sukumar Ranganathan, editor in chief of the Hindustan Times. Sukumar and Milan break down the nuts and bolts of the budget—from spending priorities to the fiscal deficit and the government’s ambitious plans for disinvestment. The two also discuss the government’s broader economy strategy, including India’s continued inward turn on trade.
Episode notes:

Editorial, “What Union Budget 2021-2011 Gets Right,” Hindustan Times.
Roshan Kishore, “Where the Budget Gets India’s Economy Wrong,” Hindustan Times.
Yamini Aiyar, “Decoding the Budget and the Economics of Welfare,” Hindustan Times.
Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian, “India’s Inward (Re)Turn: Is it Warranted? Will it Work?”

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This week on the show, Milan sits down with Vinay Sitapati, political scientist and author of the blockbuster new book, Jugalbandi: The BJP Before Modi. Vinay’s new book gives readers the crucial backstory to understanding India’s current political moment and it is full of historical insights, colourful anecdotes, and a decent dash of insider gossip.

Vinay and Milan discuss the unusual duo of Atal Behari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani, Hindu nationalism’s obsession with elections, the BJP’s “schizophrenic” approach to economics, and how the Hindu nationalist movement manages to balance the twin impulses of inclusion and exclusion. Plus, Vinay explains how a better understanding of the BJP of yesteryear can inform our thinking about Narendra Modi and Amit Shah today.

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Ravinder, a professor of Modern South Asia Studies at the University of Copenhagen, joins Milan on the show this week to talk about her new book. The two discuss how brand-building is displacing nation-building in the 21st century and who the makers of India’s “new brand” actually are. Plus, Milan and Ravinder discuss the untold backstory of the “India Shining” campaign and why Prime Minister Modi’s notion of a “New India” is not all that new after all.

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This week on the show, Chinmay speaks with Milan about India’s “Age of Pandemics” and why this dark chapter in Indian history has been glossed over. Chinmay and Milan also discuss the parallels between pandemics past and present, how pandemics have shaped politics, and why the flight of internal migrants is one of the most stylized facts of pandemics in history.

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On the podcast this week, Milan sits down with Evan Feigenbaum, Vice President of Studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on the Asia region—from China to Kazakhstan to India and Sri Lanka.

Evan talks to Milan about the Trump administration’s Asia legacy, India’s inward turn, and the strategic relevance of the Quad. Evan also has some useful, pithy advice for how the incoming Biden administration might position itself in the Asia-Pacific.

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Joining Milan to talk all things elections are Grand Tamasha news-round up regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution.

The trio discuss the key lessons of the U.S. 2020 election, the implications for India, and what the election tells us about the configuration of power in the United States come January 2021. Milan, Sadanand, and Tanvi also discuss the Bihar elections, what they say about Modi’s popularity and the trials and tribulations of the political opposition.

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This week, Milan sits down with Viral Acharya, former Deputy Governor at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) from 2017-2019, and author of the recent book, Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India.

Milan and Viral discuss the health of India’s economy, the “silent crisis” afflicting India’s financial sector, the future of central bank independence in India, and the role that Indian economists based overseas can play back home.

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Since the onset of the novel Coronavirus, award-winning data journalist Rukmini has investigated the virus’ spread in India like very few people have.

Twice a week since March, she’s been recording her thoughts on the pandemic in a short “mini-podcast” called The Moving Curve.

In 100 bite-sized episodes, Rukmini has helped educate Indians--and their political leaders--about this unprecedented public health crisis straight from her home studio.

This week, Rukmini joins Milan to talk about the state of COVID-19 in India, the country’s surprisingly low fatality rate, and what large-scale seroprevalence studies tell us about where the virus is heading. Plus, Rukmini evaluates the impact of India’s lockdown and how the media has reported on the pandemic.

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In this week's episode, Pankaj Mishra and Milan Vaishnav discuss the state of Indian democracy, the (absent) standard-bearers of Indian liberalism, and how the Cold War-era conception of democracy helped India geopolitically. They also discuss what the British Raj can tell us about Brexit and the future of big government, for good and for ill.

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Today, Milan speaks with Sumitra Badrinathan (University of Pennsylvania) and Devesh Kapur (Johns Hopkins-SAIS) about the findings of a brand new survey--the Indian American Attitudes Survey (IAAS)-- that sheds light on the political attitudes of Indian Americans (full disclosure: Milan is a co-author of the new study). Milan, Devesh and Sumitra discuss why Indian Americans, contrary to media reports, remain solidly with the Democratic Party and why they are overwhelmingly concerned with kitchen table issues, rather than foreign policy concerns such as U.S.-India relations. They also talk about the impact of Kamala Harris, partisan polarization among Indians in America, and why Republicans face an uphill climb to win over Indian American voters.

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This week Milan is joined by political scientist Paul Staniland, author of a recent Carnegie essay titled, “Political Violence in South Asia: The Triumph of the State?” Paul is an associate professor at the University of Chicago and nonresident scholar with the South Asia Program at Carnegie.

Milan and Paul discuss intra-state conflict trends in the region, the massive rise in India’s internal security forces, the precarious state of liberal democracy in South Asia, and what South Asia can tell us about political violence in America.

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If you’ve watched prime time television in India at any point in the last two decades, there is zero chance that you are not acquainted with Milan’s guest on the show this week. Since 1999, the journalist Nidhi Razdan has been reporting on the biggest news coming out of India--from politics to the economy and, especially, foreign affairs.

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This week on this show, Milan sits down with the Carnegie Endowment’s Ashley J. Tellis, one of the world’s foremost experts on Indian foreign policy. Milan and Ashley discuss recent fighting along India’s Chinese border, the motivations animating Chinese strategic calculations, the implications for U.S. foreign policy, and growing international concerns about the character of India’s domestic regime.

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This week on Grand Tamasha, Milan is joined by podcast regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution to discuss the triple-whammy of crises facing India. The three discuss the latest on India’s contested border with China, the raging COVID pandemic--which shows very little sign of slowing down, and end with a discussion of the latest economic data. As always, they end by chatting about the news you need to be following (but may not be) and who had the best and worst weeks in India.

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This week on the podcast, Scaachi joins Milan to discuss her Indo-Canadian upbringing, how politics in Kashmir stirs up family conflict, and the cultural import of “Indian Matchmaking.” She also talks about her unique relationship with her father--a frequent (and humorous) presence in her writing and on her social media feed.

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This week, Amit joins Milan on the show to reflect on his career as a journalist, author, entrepreneur, podcast host, and--yes--professional poker player. Milan talks to Amit about his libertarian leanings, his views on nationalism, and why exactly India has so few economic reformers.

If you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you are a fan of the podcast, “The Seen and the Unseen.” For 186 episodes and counting, the journalist Amit Varma has been putting together some of the most thoughtful, insightful and eclectic conversations with the best and brightest in India.

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On August 15, 2020, India celebrated its 73rd birthday. To reflect on the state of Indian democracy and to kick off the podcast’s fourth season, Pratap Bhanu Mehta joins Milan for a wide-ranging conversation on India’s past, present, and future.

Pratap is a professor of political science at Ashoka University and a contributing editor and columnist at the Indian Express. He is a noted author, scholar, and commentator, not to mention arguably India’s finest public intellectual.

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