But the partnership is also facing new uncertainties: geopolitical turbulence in the Middle East, shifting trade dynamics, and questions about the future direction of U.S. foreign policy.

At the same time, domestic politics in the United States are changing. While Indian Americans still vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party, a sizeable number of them changed sides and voted for Donald Trump and the Republican Party in 2024.

To help us unpack all of this, this week Milan spoke with Congressman Ami Bera in his office on Capitol Hill. Bera represents California's 6th congressional district and has been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives since 2013.

He is a longtime member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, one of the most prominent voices on U.S.-India relations in Congress, and a founding member of the so-called Samosa Caucus—a group of congressional representatives of Indian origin.

Milan and Rep. Bera talked about Trump’s war on Iran, the turbulence in the U.S.-India relationship, and the trade and immigration moves that have unsettled the Indian American community.

Episode notes:

1.     Ami Bera, “Why I Voted for the Iran War Powers Resolution,” Ami’s Substack, March 5, 2026.

2.     Ami Bera, “Reps. Bera, Wilson Lead Bipartisan Resolution Recognizing U.S.-India Strategic Partnership,” November 17, 2025.

3.     “Can the U.S. Salvage Its Relationship with India? (with Lisa Curtis),” Grand Tamasha, February 4, 2026. 

4.     “The Quiet Resilience of U.S.–India Defense Cooperation (with Sameer Lalwani),” Grand Tamasha, December 9, 2025.

With Hasina’s fall and a new government in office, the country once again stands at a crossroads testing whether institutional reform and electoral competition can deliver lasting democratic stability.

To talk about the new political era in Bangladesh, Milan is joined on the show this week by Naomi Hossain. Naomi is Global Research Professor with the Department of Development Studies at SOAS University of London. She has researched extensively across Bangladesh and has managed large international studies spanning 20 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Naomi is the author of the acclaimed 2017 book, The Aid Lab: Understanding Bangladesh's Unexpected Success.

Naomi and Milan discuss the abrupt end to Hasina’s fifteen-year rule, the performance of the interim government under Muhammad Yunus, and the prospects for new prime minister Tarique Rahman. Plus, the two discuss the country’s immense economic challenges and the role of the military.

Episode notes:

1.        Naomi Hossain, “Ali Riaz's Big Bet,” Counterpoint, January 19, 2026.

2.        Naomi Hossain, “Dhaka pre-election diary (pt 1, possibly, of 2),” Substack, January 6-19, 2026.

3.        “How India Lost the Neighborhood (with Muhib Rahman),” Grand Tamasha, February 11, 2026.

4.        “Sri Lanka's Peaceful Revolution (with Neil DeVotta),” Grand Tamasha, January 25, 2025.

But a new book by scholars Sandra Destradi and Johannes Plagemann argues that—while populists can have dramatic impacts on foreign policy—the extent of change depends on two key factors: the personalization of foreign policy and leaders’ ability to use foreign policy as a tool of domestic political mobilization.

The book is called Populism and Foreign Policy, and it looks at transitions from non-populist to populist governments in Bolivia, the Philippines, Turkey, and India. 

To talk more about the book’s findings—especially as they relate to Indian foreign policy—Sandra Destradi joins Milan on the show this week. Sandra holds the Chair of International Relations at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and she is currently serving as a DAAD long- term Guest Professor at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel. She is the author of several articles and books on India, including the 2012 book, Indian Foreign and Security Policy in South Asia: Regional Power Strategies.

Milan and Sandra discuss the definitional debates around populism, the conditional effects of populism on foreign policy, and the reasons for the Modi government’s differential approach to Pakistan and China. Plus, the two discuss why populists might express an enhanced willingness to contribute to global public goods, the limited opportunities for mobilization against multilateral institutions, and the differences between populists in the Global North versus the Global South.

Episode notes:

1.     “Populism, South Asian Style (with Adnan Naseemullah and Pradeep Chhibber),” Grand Tamasha, December 18, 2024.

2.     Johannes Plagemann and Sandra Destradi, “Populism and Foreign Policy: The Case of India,” Foreign Policy Analysis 15, no. 2 (April 2019): 283–301. 
 

3.     Sandra Destradi, “Domestic Politics and Regional Hegemony: India’s Approach to Sri Lanka,” E-International Relations, January 14, 2014.

From the announcement on a long-delayed EU-India Free Trade Agreement to expanding cooperation on security, technology, and migration, Europe and India appear to be finally converging around a shared strategic logic.

To unpack what’s driving this convergence and where its limits lie Milan is joined on the show this week by Garima Mohan. Garima is a senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund based in Brussels. In this capacity, she leads GMF’s work on India and serves as convenor of the India Trilateral Forum. 

Her research focuses on Europe-India ties, EU foreign policy in Asia, and security in the Indo-Pacific. She’s also the author of a new GMF report titled, “A Long Time Coming: Europe and India have discovered a strategic partnership,” published in January 2026.

Milan and Garima discuss the geopolitical drivers that are bringing the EU and India closer together, Europe’s views on the limits to India’s potential, and the key takeaways from the EU-India FTA. Plus, the two discuss how Russia might derail Indo-European security cooperation and the urgent need for Europe to invest in India expertise.

Episode notes:

1.     “Europe’s long-awaited free-trade deal with India,” The Economist, January 25, 2026.

2.     Garima Mohan, “As Trump takes Office, Planets Align for the EU and India,” India’s World, March 6, 2025.

3.     “Can Europe be India's Plan B? (with James Crabtree),” Grand Tamasha, September 17, 2025.

4.     “India and the Reordering of Transatlantic Relations (with Tara Varma),” Grand Tamasha, March 11, 2025.
 

A few weeks ago, the European Union and India announced a mega-trade deal that was more than two decades in the works. And just days after this news broke, the White House announced that the United States had also reached an understanding with India on trade, an issue which had sapped relations between the two erstwhile partners over the past year.

To help make sense of what’s changed and what hasn’t Milan is joined on this show this week by Mark Linscott. Mark is a nonresident senior fellow on India at the Atlantic Council and a Senior Advisor with The Asia Group. He previously served as the assistant US trade representative for South and Central Asian Affairs from 2016 to 2018. 

He has more than 30 years of experience working on trade and economic issues at the Commerce Department and USTR. It is my pleasure to welcome him to the show for the very first time.

Milan and Mark discuss India’s new external trade posture, the geopolitics and economics of the EU-India FTA, and the timing and substance of India’s trade deal with the United States. Plus, the two discuss India’s relative positioning vis-à-vis other Asian competitors and the possible roadblocks in the way of a larger U.S.-India accord.

Episode notes:

1.     Ravi Dutta Mishra, “How India’s US deal tariff advantage over Bangladesh vanished overnight,” Indian Express, February 10, 2026.

2.     Arvind Subramanian, “India may be about to become one of the world’s most open economies,” The Economist, February 5, 2026.

3.     Michael Kugelman and Mark Linscott, “What to know about the US-India trade deal,” Atlantic Council “Dispatches” blog, February 2, 2026. 

4.     “Can the U.S. Salvage Its Relationship with India? (with Lisa Curtis),” Grand Tamasha, February 4, 2026.

5.     Michael Kugelman and Mark Linscott, “The India–EU trade deal is worth watching, but not overhyping,” Atlantic Council “Dispatches” blog, January 27, 2026. 

But in a recent Foreign Affairs essay titled “The Folly of India’s Illiberal Hegemony,” the scholar Muhib Rahman argues that there is a larger regional story at play—one that implicates not just local leaders, but also India and the United States. The essay challenges the assumption that India’s regional leadership has been a stabilizing force and asks whether New Delhi’s choices have instead helped create openings for China across South Asia.

To talk more about the essay, Muhib joins Milan on the show this week. Muhib is a Perry World House Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. His research sits at the intersection of international security, emerging technologies, and the politics of the Global South. He has served as a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University and holds a Ph.D. in Government from the University of Texas-Austin.

Muhib and Milan discuss India’s illiberal hegemony in its neighborhood, the downturn in Bangladesh-India ties, and the enabling role of the United States. Plus, the two discuss the drivers of the “India Out” phenomenon in countries ranging from Nepal to the Maldives and how China is positioning itself to take advantage.

Episode notes:

1.     Muhib Rahman, “Bangladesh’s Quiet Pivot to China,” The National Interest, October 27, 2025.

2.     Muhib Rahman, “Explaining Trump’s Surprising Turn to Pakistan,” War on the Rocks, October 1, 2025.

3.     “Why Washington Is Wooing Pakistan (with Uzair Younus),” Grand Tamasha, October 1, 2025.
 

4.     “Sri Lanka's Peaceful Revolution (with Neil DeVotta),” Grand Tamasha, January 29, 2025.

To talk more about this new piece, Lisa joins Milan on the show this week. Lisa is Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. She is a foreign policy and national security expert with over 20 years of service in the U.S. government including at the National Security Council, CIA, State Department, and Capitol Hill. Most recently, Lisa served as Senior Director for South and Central Asia at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2021.  Milan and Lisa discuss the “fit of presidential pride and pique” that has derailed bilateral ties, President Trump’s repeated desire to mediate between India and Pakistan, and the sudden revival in U.S.-Pakistan ties. Plus, the two discuss America’s strategic competition with Beijing, what it will take for Washington to remedy its trust deficit with New Delhi, and the long-term consequences of a sustained rupture between the United States and India.

• A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey
  By Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian. Published by HarperCollins India.
• Believer’s Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right’s Path to Power, 1977–2018
  By Abhishek Choudhary. Published by Pan Macmillan India.
• Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
  By Sam Dalrymple. Published by HarperCollins India.

Taken together, these books showcase the breadth of scholarship animating debates on India and South Asia today. They remind us that the region’s past remains contested, its present deeply complex, and its future still uncertain. I hope you find these conversations as stimulating and inspiring as I did.One final note here: As you consider your year-end charitable giving, we hope you will choose to support Grand Tamasha. This season, you might have noticed that we’ve expanded into video, allowing listeners to watch full-length conversations on YouTube. Listener contributions sustain the costs of production, research, and distribution—especially as we expand our video offerings. The podcast receives no external funding beyond what our audience generously provides, and contributions from U.S.-based supporters are fully tax-deductible. We would be grateful for whatever support you can offer. Please visit https://donate.carnegieendowment.org/for more information on how you can give.On behalf of the entire team, we hope you have a wonderful holiday season. Thanks for listening to the show—and see you in the new year. Episode notes:

1. “The Forgotten Partitions That Remade South Asia (with Sam Dalrymple),” Grand Tamasha, October 29, 2025.

2. “A Sixth of Humanity and the Dreams of a Nation (with Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian),” Grand Tamasha, October 22, 2025.

3. “Vajpayee and the Making of the Modern BJP (with Abhishek Choudhary),” Grand Tamasha, September 3, 2025.

4.  Milan Vaishnav, “Grand Tamasha’s Best Books of 2024,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 17, 2024.

5.  Milan Vaishnav, “Grand Tamasha’s Best Books of 2023,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 19, 2023.

6.  Milan Vaishnav, “Grand Tamasha’s Best Books of the Year,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, December 20, 2022.

Sameer and Milan discuss how the U.S.-India defense partnership has survived the general tumult in the relationship, the significance of a recently signed defense framework agreement, and the future of defense co-production and co-development. Plus, the two discuss Inda’s lessons learned from Operation Sindoor and whether China still serves as the glue that keep these two powers together.

Episode notes:

1. Sameer Lalwani, “Don’t Call it a Comeback: Why US-India Relations are Due for a Rebound,” Special Competitive Studies Project, November 20, 2025.

2. Sameer Lalwani and Vikram J. Singh, “How to Get the Most Out of the U.S.-Indian Defense Partnership,” War on the Rocks, February 11, 2025.

3. “Why Washington Is Wooing Pakistan (with Uzair Younus),” Grand Tamasha, October 1, 2025.

4. “From Convergence to Confrontation: Trump’s India Gambit (with Ashley J. Tellis),” Grand Tamasha, September 24, 2025.

5. “Can Europe be India's Plan B? (with James Crabtree),” Grand Tamasha, September 17, 2025.

6. “How This India-Pakistan Conflict Will Shape the Next One (with Joshua White),” Grand Tamasha, May 21, 2025.

7. “Operation Sindoor and South Asia’s Uncertain Future (with Christopher Clary),” Grand Tamasha, May 14, 2025.

To discuss the challenges and the opportunities surrounding girls’ education in India, Milan is joined on the show this week by Gayatri Nair Lobo, the CEO of Educate Girls. Gayatri has more than 25 years of experience across the consulting and development sectors. Before joining Educate Girls, she led the ATE Chandra Foundation and the India School Leadership Institute. She has also held senior roles at Dalberg Advisors and Teach For India. Milan and Gayatri discuss the origins of Educate Girls, the supply and demand-side barriers to girls’ education, and the launch of the world’s first Development Impact Bond. Plus, the two talk about the use of tools like randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and machine learning in delivering education and how to forge lasting partnerships with state governments. Episode notes:

1. “A Blueprint for India’s State Capacity Revolution (with Karthik Muralidharan),” Grand Tamasha, May 23, 2024.

2. “Understanding the Delhi Education Experiment (with Yamini Aiyar),” Grand Tamasha, January 22, 2025.
3. “How India’s Women Are Redefining Politics (with Ruhi Tewari),” Grand Tamasha, November 5, 2025.
4. “Rohini Nilekani on the Secret to Successful Governance,” Grand Tamasha, October 5, 2022.

To talk more about the new era in ties between the UK and India, Milan is joined on the podcast this week by Avinash Paliwal. Avinash is a Reader in International Relations at SOAS University of London. He is the author of two books, My Enemy’s Enemy – India in Afghanistan from the Soviet Invasion to the US Withdrawal and India’s Near East – A New History. In 2024-25, he was seconded to the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office where he covered ‘India and South Asia’.  Milan and Avinash discuss the troubled history between the two powers, the transformation of the relationship in recent years, and their emerging trade and technology links. Plus, the two discuss the Indian diaspora in the United Kingdom, frictions around Russia and Pakistan, and the impact of rising nativism in the UK. Episode notes:

1.  Avinash Paliwal, “India’s bilateral diplomacy: A quiet rehaul of India-UK relations,” Grand Tamasha, November 5, 2025.

2. “The Past, Present, and Future of India’s Near East (with Avinash Paliwal),” Grand Tamasha, November 20, 2024.

3. “What the Taliban Takeover Means for India (with Avinash Paliwal),” Grand Tamasha, September 15, 2021.

4. “Can Europe be India's Plan B? (with James Crabtree),” Grand Tamasha, September 17, 2025.

5. “India and the Reordering of Transatlantic Relations (with Tara Varma),” Grand Tamasha, March 11, 2025.

The opposition, for its part, saw little change in its vote share from 2020, but could only muster 35 seats. To work through the elections and their larger meaning for India’s political economy, Milan is joined on the show today by the Hindustan Times data and political economy editor Roshan Kishore. Over the past several months, Roshan and his team have consistently put out the most thoughtful data and analysis on the trends in Bihar. Milan and Roshan discuss the resilience of the JD(U)–BJP alliance, the polarization in the electorate, and the dissonance within the opposition alliance’s campaign. Plus, the two discuss the Election Commission of India (ECI)’s controversial review of electoral rolls, the impact of upstart Prashant Kishor and his Jan Suraaj Party, and what the elections portend for India’s political economy beyond November. Episode notes:

1. Roshan Kishore and Abhishek Jha, “Not conspiracy, political economy explains Bihar results,” Hindustan Times, November 18, 2025.

2. Nishant Ranjan and Roshan Kishore, “The resurrection of ‘coalition of extremes’ in Bihar,” Hindustan Times, November 15, 2025.
3. Abhishek Jha and Roshan Kishore, “How did Bihar go from a 2020 cliff-hanger to a 2025 landslide?” Hindustan Times, November 15, 2025.
4. Roshan Kishore, Abhishek Jha, and Nishant Ranjan, “Three key takeaways from Bihar results,” Hindustan Times, November 15, 2025.
5. Roshan Kishore, “Bihar election results: Twelve Ds that explain the Bihar results,” Hindustan Times, November 14, 2025.
6.  “A Sixth of Humanity and the Dreams of a Nation (with Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian),” Grand Tamasha, October 22, 2025. 
7. Neelanjan Sircar, “The Welfarist Prime Minister: Explaining the National-State Election Gap,” Economic and Political Weekly 56, no. 10 (March 2021).

1. Paul Staniland, Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).

2. “The Past, Present, and Future of India’s Near East (with Avinash Paliwal),” Grand Tamasha, November 20, 2024.

3. “Paul Staniland on the Surprising Decline in Political Violence in South Asia,” Grand Tamasha, October 7, 2020.

4. “Binalakshmi Nepram on the Realities of India’s Oft-Forgotten Northeast,” Grand Tamasha, June 3, 2020.

Episode notes:1.

Milan Vaishnav, ed. How Indian Voters Decide (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2025).

2. Anirvan Chowdhury, “How the BJP Wins Over Women,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 26, 2024.
3. Rithika Kumar, “What Lies Behind India’s Rising Female Voter Turnout,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 5, 2024.

4.Milan Vaishnav, “Indian Women Are Voting More Than Ever. Will They Change Indian Society?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 8, 2018.

5. Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson, “Will Women Decide India’s 2019 Elections?” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 12, 2018.

6. “Taking On India's Patriarchal Political Order (with Soledad Artiz Prillaman),” Grand Tamasha, October 22, 2024.

A new book the author Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, presents the unknown back story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. Sam is a historian and award-winning filmmaker who grew up in Delhi. He graduated from Oxford University as a Persian and Sanskrit scholar. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition of India. His debut film, Child of Empire, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, and he runs the history Substack @ travelsofsamwise.

To talk more about his new book, Sam joins Milan on the podcast this week. They discuss Sam’s personal journey with the Partition of the subcontinent, the forgotten separation of Burma from the Indian Empire, and Delhi’s dismissiveness of its Gulf outposts. Plus, the two talk about the creation of Pakistan, the twin genocides of 1971, and the special resonance of the princely state of Junagadh in modern-day Gujarat. Episode notes:

1. Sam Dalrymple, “The Gujarati Kingdom That Almost Joined Pakistan,” Travels of Samwise (Substack), July 5, 2025.

2. Nishad Sanzagiri, “Shattered Lands by Sam Dalrymple review – the many partitions of southern Asia,” The Guardian, July 1, 2025.

3. “Ramachandra Guha Revisits India After Gandhi,” Grand Tamasha, April 19, 2023.

4. Preeti Zacharia, “Interview with historian Sam Dalrymple, author of Shattered Lands,” Hindu, July 8, 2025.

5. Sam Dalrymple, “The Lingering Shadow of India’s Painful Partition,” TIME, July 14, 2025.

Devesh Kapur is the Starr Foundation Professor of South Asia Studies at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Arvind Subramanian is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC. He previously served as the former chief economic adviser to the government of India. The trio discuss the vision for the book, India’s checkered history of upholding the rule of law, and what we get wrong about India’s tryst with central planning. Plus, they discuss India’s stellar record as an export powerhouse, the long shadow of vested interests, the pressures on India’s model of fiscal federalism, and ongoing challenges with nation-building. Episode notes:1.

Arvind Subramanian, “Can India reverse its manufacturing failure?” Financial Times, November 10, 2024.

2. Josh Felman and Arvind Subramanian, “Is India Really the Next China?” Foreign Policy, April 8, 2024.

3. “The Future of India's Fiscal Federalism (with Arvind Subramanian),” Grand Tamasha, October 16, 2024.

4. Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur, eds., Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).

5. “Opening the Black Box of India’s Internal Security State (with Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur),” Grand Tamasha, May 10, 2023.

6. Devesh Kapur, “Why Does the Indian State Both Fail and Succeed?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 31-54.

7. Rohit Lamba and Arvind Subramanian, “Dynamism with Incommensurate Development: The Distinctive Indian Model,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 34, no. 1 (Winter 2020): 3-30.

8. Yamini Aiyar, “New GST regime: A grand bargain reduced to imperfect compromise,” Hindustan Times, October 7, 2025.

9. “A Blueprint for India’s State Capacity Revolution (with Karthik Muralidharan),” Grand Tamasha, May 23, 2024.

Justice Chandrachud is the author of a new compilation of speeches titled, Why the Constitution Matters. In it, the author reflects on his quarter-century of experience as a judge, illustrating how the Constitution impacts everyday life and why it remains a cornerstone of democracy.Justice Chandrachud joins Milan this week to about his new book and the state of the Court in India today. The two discuss the place of the Court in India’s current political environment, the relationship between the judicial and executive branches, the weaknesses in the rule of law supply chain, and the role of the Court in “cleansing politics.” Plus, the two discuss the Court’s verdict in the controversial electoral bonds case, the judicial branch’s need for administrative reforms, and public trust in the Supreme Court

Episode notes:

1. “A Blueprint for India’s State Capacity Revolution (with Karthik Muralidharan),” Grand Tamasha, May 23, 2024.

2. “The Indian Supreme Court in the Modi Era (with Gautam Bhatia),” Grand Tamasha, December 13, 2023.

3. “Demystifying the Indian Supreme Court (with Aparna Chandra),” Grand Tamasha, November 15, 2023.

4. Pratik Datta and Suyash Rai, “How to Start Resolving the Indian Judiciary’s Long-Running Case Backlog,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 9, 2021.

5. Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav, “Strengthening Rule of Law,” in Bibek Debroy, Ashley J. Tellis, and Reece Trevor, eds. Getting India Back on Track: An Action Agenda for Reform (New Delhi: Random House India, 2014): 247-263

To watch this episode, click here.

Episode notes:

1. Britta Glennon, “Skilled Immigrants, Firms, and the Global Geography of Innovation,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 38, no. 1 (Winter 2024): 3-26.

2. Britta Glennon, “How Do Restrictions on High-Skilled Immigration Affect Offshoring? Evidence from the H-1B Program​,” Management Science 70, no. 2 (February 2024): 907-930.

3. Saerom (Ronnie) Lee and Britta Glennon, “The Effect of Immigration Policy on Founding Location Choice: Evidence from Canada’s Start-up Visa Program,” NBER Working Paper 31634 (August 2023).

4. Robert Flynn, Britta Glennon, Raviv Murciano-Goroff, and Jiusi Xiao, “Building a Wall Around Science: The Effect of U.S.-China Tensions on International Scientific Research,” NBER Working Paper 32622 (May 2025).

5. Vox, “$100,000 for a visa,” Today, Explained (podcast), September 25, 2025.

1. Uzair Younus, “The US Is Rethinking the India-Pakistan Dynamic,” The Diplomat, September 3, 2025.

2. Moeed Yusuf, “Why America Should Bet on Pakistan,” Foreign Affairs, September 11, 2025.

3. “How This India-Pakistan Conflict Will Shape the Next One (with Joshua T. White),” Grand Tamasha, May 21, 2025.

4. “Operation Sindoor and South Asia’s Uncertain Future (with Christopher Clary),” Grand Tamasha, May 14, 2025.

5. “Pakistan's Political Earthquake (with Zoha Waseem),” Grand Tamasha, February 14, 2024.

Episode notes:

1. Robert D. Blackwill and Ashley J. Tellis, “The India Dividend: New Delhi Remains Washington’s Best Hope in Asia,” Foreign Affairs 98, no. 5 (September/October 2019): 173-183.

2. Ashley J. Tellis, “India’s Great-Power Delusions: How New Delhi’s Grand Strategy Thwarts Its Grand Ambitions,” Foreign Affairs 104, no. 4 (July/August 2025): 52-67.

3. Lisa Curtis, Dhruva Jaishankar, Nirupama Rao, and Ashley J. Tellis, “What Kind of Great Power Will India Be? Debating New Delhi’s Grand Strategy,” Foreign Affairs 104, no. 5 (September/October 2025): 186-195.

4. Ashley J. Tellis, “America’s Bad Bet on India: New Delhi Won’t Side With Washington Against Beijing,” Foreign Affairs, May 1, 2023.

5. Milan Vaishnav, “How India Can Placate America,” Foreign Affairs, July 16, 2025.

6. “Trade Wars: Trump Targets India (with Sadanand Dhume and Tanvi Madan),” Grand Tamasha, August 12, 2025.

7. “What Kind of Great Power Will India Become? (with Ashley J. Tellis),” Grand Tamasha, July 2, 2025.

Episode notes:

1. James Crabtree, “Why India Should Not Walk Into the China-Russia Trap,” Foreign Policy, August 27, 2025.

2. “India and the Reordering of Transatlantic Relations (with Tara Varma),” Grand Tamasha, March 11, 2025.

Episode notes:

1. Shubhangi Misra, “KM Panikkar was a scapegoat. It was easier to blame him for China than Nehru,” ThePrint, August 1, 2025.

2. Narayani Basu, “How K.M. Panikkar became India’s first ambassador to China,” Mint Lounge, July 13, 2025.

3. “Jairam Ramesh on the Many Lives of V.K. Krishna Menon,” Grand Tamasha, March 24, 2021.

The first volume of this biography, Vajpayee; The Ascent of the Hindu Right, 1924-1977, was widely acclaimed, winning the 2023 Tata Literature First Book Award in 2023. Abhishek Choudhary studied economics in Delhi and Chennai, followed by stints in nonprofits and journalism.

To discuss part two of this exceptional work, which Ram Guha calls the “finest biography of an Indian prime minister that I have ever read,” Abhishek joins Milan on the podcast this week. They discuss Vajpayee’s entry into the Sangh Parivar, his turbulent stint as foreign minister, and his core ideological beliefs. Plus, the two discuss Vajpayee’s unique partnership with L.K. Advani and his dealings with Narendra Modi in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots.

1. Praveen Swami, “Asim Munir’s India nuke threat from US ballroom—‘will take half the world down,’” ThePrint, August 10, 2025.

2. Sadanand Dhume, “India Is Losing Its Best and Brightest,” Wall Street Journal, July 30, 2025.

3. “Tanvi Madan on the geopolitical shifts revealed by the India-Pakistan crisis,” The Economist, May 12, 2025.

4. Ashley J. Tellis, “India’s Great-Power Delusions,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2025).

5. Nirupama Rao, Dhruva Jaishankar, Lisa Curtis, and Ashley J. Tellis, “What Kind of Great Power Will India Be?” Foreign Affairs (September/October 2025).

6. Milan Vaishnav, “How India Can Placate America,” Foreign Affairs, July 16, 2025.

7. “What Kind of Great Power Will India Become? (with Ashley J. Tellis),” Grand Tamasha, July 2, 2025.

Episode notes:

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

2. Ashley J. Tellis, “Great Expectations: India amid US-China Competition,” in Hal Brands, ed., Lessons from the New Cold War: America Confronts the China Challenge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025).

3. Ashley J. Tellis, “India Sees Opportunity in Trump’s Global Turbulence. That Could Backfire,” Carnegie Endowment Emissary (blog), April 9, 2025.

4. “Trade, Tariffs, and India's Silver Lining (with Shoumitro Chatterjee),” Grand Tamasha, April 16, 2025.

5. “The Precarious State of U.S.-India Ties (with Rajesh Rajagopalan),” Grand Tamasha, February 26, 2025.

Episode notes:

1. “A Reappraisal of Indira Gandhi’s Life—and Legacy (with Srinath Raghavan),” Grand Tamasha, June 11, 2025.

2. “The Secret to Indian Americans' Success (with Meenakshi Ahamed),” Grand Tamasha, June 4, 2025.

3. “The Indian American Vote in 2024 (with Sumitra Badrinathan and Devesh Kapur),” Grand Tamasha, November 6, 2024.

4. “What to read about Hindutva,” The Economist, April 5, 2024.

A new book by the historian Srinath Raghavan, Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India, unpacks that legacy, uncovering fresh material that challenges much of the conventional wisdom we’ve accumulated over the years.Srinath is professor of international relations and history at Ashoka University and nonresident scholar at Carnegie India.

He is the author of several celebrated books, including India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia and Fierce Enigmas: A History of the United States in South Asia.He joins Milan on the show this week to discuss Gandhi’s unforeseen right to power, the daunting conditions which greeted her premiership, and her improvisatory leadership during the 1971 war. Plus, the two discuss Gandhi’s mixed economic legacy, the onset of the Emergency, and how our understanding of the “long 1970s” must be updated.

Episode notes:

1. Soutik Biswas, “The forgotten story of India's brush with presidential rule,” BBC News, June 9, 2025.

2. TCA Srinivasa Raghavan, “Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India,” Hindu Business Line, May 27, 2025.

Episode notes:

1. Sanjoy Chakravorty, Devesh Kapur, and Nirvikar Singh, The Other One Percent: Indians in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

2. “Understanding India’s Diaspora,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

3. Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, and Milan Vaishnav, “Indian Americans at the Ballot Box: Results From the 2024 Indian American Attitudes Survey,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 28, 2024.

4. “Meenakshi Ahamed on U.S.-India Relations from Truman to Trump,” Grand Tamasha, February 17, 2021.

Episode notes:1. “Republic Day Episode: Madhav Khosla on India’s Founding Moment,” Grand Tamasha, January 28, 2020.

2. Sandipto Dasgupta, “Gandhi’s Failure: Anticolonial Movements,” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 3 (2017).

3. Sandipto Dasgupta, “‘A Language Which Is Foreign to Us’: Continuities and Anxieties in the Making of the Indian Constitution,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 2 (2014): 228–242.

Episode notes:

1. Joshua T. White, “Lessons for the next India-Pakistan war,” Brookings Institution, May 14, 2025.

2. “Operation Sindoor and South Asia’s Uncertain Future (with Christopher Clary),” Grand Tamasha, May 14, 2025.

3. “US views of India-China ties and their impact on the US-India partnership (with Lisa Curtis, Joshua T. White, and Tanvi Madan),” Brookings “Global India” podcast, February 7, 2024.

4. “U.S.-India Ties After the ‘2+2’ Summit (with Joshua White),” Grand Tamasha, April 27, 2022.

India’s strike prompted a worrying tit-for-tat standoff which quickly escalated into the worst conflict between the two nuclear-armed nations in a quarter-century. The fighting has stopped for now, leaving policymakers, scholars, and analysts the task of deciphering the longer-term consequences of the recent crisis.

To break things down, Milan is joined on the show this week by Christopher Clary. Chris is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Albany. He’s also a non-resident fellow at the Henry L. Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

Listeners may remember Chris from his 2022 appearance on Grand Tamasha, when he discussed his book, The Difficult Politics of Peace: Rivalry in Modern South Asia.

Milan and Chris discuss why the Pahalgam episode marked a new chapter in India-Pakistan relations, how the recent conflict will serve as a template for the next crisis, and the possible motivations for U.S. intervention. Plus, the two discuss what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East can teach us about India and Pakistan’s likely future.

Episode notes:

1. Christopher Clary, “India-Pakistan rivalry is old, but Pahalgam marked a new chapter,” Times of India, May 11, 2025.
2. Sudhi Ranjan Sen et al., “Trump Truce Leaves India Furious, Pakistan Elated as Risks Loom,” Bloomberg, May 11, 2025.
3. Karishma Mehrotra et al., “The U.S. helped deliver an India-Pakistan ceasefire. But can it hold?” Washington Post, May 10, 2025.
4. “When and Why Do India and Pakistan Fight (with Christopher Clary),” Grand Tamasha, September 14, 2022.

Making India Work: The Development of Welfare in a Multi-Level Democracy is a new book by the scholar Louise Tillin. It examines the development of India’s welfare state over the last century from the early decades of the twentieth century to the present. In so doing, it recovers a history previously relegated to the margins of scholarship on the political economy of development.

Louise is a Professor of Politics in the King’s India Institute at King’s College London. She is one of the world’s leading experts on Indian federalism, subnational comparative politics, and social policy. She is the author or editor of several previous books, including Remapping India: New States and their Political Origins.

Louise joins Milan on the show this week to discuss India’s “precocious” welfare regime, the pre-colonial debates over social insurance in India, and the pros and cons of the Nehruvian development model. Plus, the two discuss inter-state variation in modes of social protection and the current debate over welfare in India circa 2025.

Episode notes:

1. “Understanding the Delhi Education Experiment (with Yamini Aiyar),” Grand Tamasha, January 22, 2025.
2. Louise Tillin, “This is the moment for a new federal compact,” Indian Express, June 16, 2024.
3. Rohan Venkataramakrishnan, “Interview: How has Indian federalism evolved under the BJP?” Scroll.in, April 13, 2024.
4. Louise Tillin and Sandhya Venkateswaran, “Democracy and Health in India| Is Health an Electoral Priority?” (New Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2023)

However, the drastic measure roiled markets and eventually resulted in the President imposing a 90-day pause on most tariffs, with the exception of strategic sectors and imports from China. India, for its part, was slapped with a 26% tariff even as top officials were negotiating a bilateral trade agreement with their American counterparts.

While the fate of future tariffs and any side agreements are unknown, the episode raises serious questions about India’s global economic strategy. To talk about where India goes from here, Milan is joined on the show this week by Shoumitro Chatterjee. Shoumitro is an Assistant Professor of International Economics at Johns Hopkins-SAIS. His research lies at the intersection of development economics, trade, and macroeconomics, but he has also done seminal work on the role of agriculture in development.

Milan and Shoumitro discuss India’s surprising export-led success, its underperformance in low-skilled manufacturing, and the country’s inward turn post-2017. Plus, the two discuss how India can take advantage of the current global uncertainty and where the politically sensitive agricultural sector fits in.

Episode notes:

1. Shoumitro Chatterjee, “In Trump’s tariff world, India must say: We are open for business,” Indian Express, April 4, 2025.
2. Abhishek Anand, Shoumitro Chatterjee, Josh Felman, Arvind Subramanian, and Naveen Thomas, “How quality control orders are crippling India's trade competitiveness,” Business Standard, March 4, 2025.
3. Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian, “India’s inward (re)turn: is it warranted? Will it work?” Indian Economic Review 58 (2023): 35-59.
4. Shoumitro Chatterjee, Devesh Kapur, Pradyut Sekhsaria, and Arvind Subramanian, “Agricultural Federalism: New Facts, Constitutional Vision,” Economic and Political Weekly 62, no. 36 (2022): 39-48.
5. Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian, “India’s Export-Led Growth: Exemplar and Exception,” Ashoka Center for Economic Policy Working Paper No. 01, October 2020.
6. Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian, “To embrace atmanirbharta is to choose to condemn Indian economy to mediocrity,” Indian Express, October 15, 2020.
7. Shoumitro Chatterjee and Arvind Subramanian, “Has India Occupied the Export Space Vacated by China? 21st Century Export Performance and Policy Implications,” in Euijin Jung, Arvind Subramanian, and Steven R. Weisman, editors, A Wary Partnership: Future of US-India Economic Relations (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2020).
8. Shoumitro Chatterjee and Devesh Kapur, “Six Puzzles in Indian Agriculture,” India Policy Forum 13, no. 1 (2017): 185-229.

The Backstage of Democracy: India's Election Campaigns and the People Who Manage Them is a new book by the scholar Amogh Dhar Sharma which tries to locate answers to this question. The book takes readers behind the scenes, where they are introduced to Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) IT cell workers, campaign consultants, data strategists and backroom politicians.

Amogh is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford. His research explores the interface between politics and technology, political communication, and histories of science and technology.

Amogh joins Milan on the show this week to discuss the professionalization of politics in India, how the middle class relates to politics, and the BJP’s unexpected embrace of digital technology. Plus, the two discuss enigmatic backroom strategist Prashant Kishor and the rise of political consultants.

Episode notes:

1. Amogh Dhar Sharma, “The Cautious Rise of Political Consulting in India,” The Wire, September 6, 2024.
2. Roshan Kishore, “Terms of Trade: How to look at the rise of electoral consultants in India,” Hindustan Times, February 21, 2025.
3. Nilesh Christopher and Varsha Bansal, “How a Secret BJP War Room Mobilized Female Voters to Win the Indian Elections,” WIRED, July 30, 2024.

Through a mix of political history and reportage, The Reactionary Spirit reveals how the United States serves the birthplace of a new authoritarian style, and why we’re now seeing its evolution in a diverse set of countries ranging from Hungary to Israel to India.

Zack is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, right-wing populism, and the world of ideas. He is also the author of “On the Right,” a newsletter about the American conservative movement.

To talk more about the book and our current political moment, Zack joins Milan on the show this week. The two discuss the rise of competitive authoritarianism, inequality and democracy, and the strange era of “autocracy without autocrats.” Plus, Zack and Milan discuss transnational linkages between rightwing populists and India’s role in the global fight for reclaiming democracy.

Episode notes:

1. Zack Beauchamp, “Why do US politics affect the rest of the world?” Vox, February 28, 2025.

2.Zack Beauchamp, “Their democracy died. They have lessons for America about Trump’s power grab,” February 5, 2025.

3.Zack Beauchamp, “America’s reactionary moment is here,” Vox, November 19, 2024.

4.Zack Beauchamp, “The global trend that pushed Donald Trump to victory,” Vox, November 6, 2024.

5.Zack Beauchamp, “Why the far right is surging all over the world,” Vox, July 17, 2024.

But over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, he would go on to become one of the most recognizable and revered diplomats of his generation.

Mahbubani served in Cambodia, Malaysia, and the United States. He was Permanent Secretary at the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs and twice served as the country’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations. He later served as founding dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Mahbubani chronicles his life journey in a new memoir titled, Living the Asian Century: An Undiplomatic Memoir.

Mahbubani’s journey mirrors Singapore’s own metamorphosis and the book sheds equal light on Mahbubani’s life as it does the Asian country’s own improbable evolution.

To talk more about the book, Kishore Mahbubani joins Milan on the podcast this week. They discuss Kishore’s childhood poverty, his “Indian soul,” and his lifelong interactions with former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Plus, Milan and Kishore discuss the explosion of cultural self-confidence in Asia and what this means for the emerging world order.

Last week, a high-level European Commission delegation embarked on a historic trip to New Delhi, where the two sides spoke optimistically of a promising new chapter in their relationship. Across the ocean in Washington, however, there were alarming signs of a breakdown in the Trans-Atlantic relationship, with the unprecedented Oval Office dressing down of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

To discuss where things stand in Europe, India, and the United States, Milan is joined on the show this week by Tara Varma. Tara is a visiting fellow in the Center of the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. Until December 2022, she was a senior policy fellow and the head of the Paris office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. She has previously worked and lived in Shanghai, London, New Delhi, and Paris.

Milan and Tara discuss the growing wedge between the United States and Europe, the significance of the recent EC visit to New Delhi, the prospects of an EU-India trade pact, and the prospects of a “New Yalta” summit between China, Russia, and the United States. Plus, the two discuss the emerging bonhomie among right-wing nationalists and the prospects of the Trump administration engineering a Sino-Russia split.

Episode notes:

1. Sophia Besch and Tara Verma, “A New Transatlantic Alliance Threatens the EU,” Carnegie Emissary (blog), February 20, 2025.

2. Patricia M. Kim et al., " The China-Russia relationship and threats to vital US interests,” Brookings Institution, December 16, 2024.

3. Tara Varma and Caroline Grassmuck, “What is going on in France?” Brookings Institution, December 13, 2024.

4. C. Raja Mohan, “In Trump’s world, India and Europe need each other,” Indian Express, February 27, 2025.

The book also serves as a comprehensive resource for those seeking to understand how India might define the emerging world order. In so doing, it rebuts the conventional wisdom that India lacks a strategic culture. Dhruva is Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation America, which he helped establish in 2020. He has previously worked at Brookings India, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Dhruva joins Milan on the podcast this week to talk more about his book and the evolution of Indian foreign policy. The two discuss why India’s approach to the world is so poorly understood, misperceptions of India’s strategic culture, and the pre-independence drivers of Indian foreign policy. Plus, Dhruva and Milan assess the state of India-Pakistan relations, challenges to India’s ability to connect with Southeast Asia, and whether and how Trump 2.0 alters India’s strategic picture.

Episode notes:

1. Dhruva Jaishankar, “Foundation for layered India-America relations,” Hindustan Times, February 17, 2025.
2. Gunjan Singh, “Vishwa Shastra: A comprehensive guide to India's evolving foreign policy,” Business Standard, January 9, 2025.
3. Dhruva Jaishankar and Tanvi Madan, “The Quad Needs a Harder Edge,” Foreign Affairs, May 19, 2022.

The first narrative, touted by the government and its backers, is that Modi skillfully threaded the needle with Trump, standing up for Indian interests but also giving the President some important early wins that can position India well for the future. The second narrative suggests a more pessimistic vision: that U.S.-India relations are at a precarious juncture, where a volatile and transactional President just might upend bilateral ties at a time when India can scarcely afford it.

To discuss where U.S.-India ties sit in the aftermath of the Modi visit, Milan is joined on the show today by Rajesh Rajagopalan. Rajesh is professor of International Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He is an expert on nuclear policy, Indian foreign policy, and U.S.-India relations. He’s also the author of a new article in ThePrint titled, “India-US ties stuck in cute acronyms. Delhi must wait out the chaos.”

On this week’s show, Milan and Rajesh discuss Joe Biden’s foreign policy legacy, India’s longstanding demands for technology transfers, and the plateauing in bilateral ties. Plus, the two discuss Delhi’s view on Elon Musk and the future of U.S.-China relations.

Episode notes:

1. “Trump and Modi, Part Deux (with Sadanand Dhume and Tanvi Madan),” Grand Tamasha, February 19, 2025.

1. Rajesh Rajagopalan, “India-US ties stuck in cute acronyms. Delhi must wait out the chaos,” ThePrint, February 17, 2025.

1. Rajesh Rajagopalan, “Trump’s blanket desire to avoid all wars can lead to the same wars he wants to avoid,” ThePrint, November 11, 2024.

1. “Dr. S. Jaishankar on the Future of U.S.-India Relations,” Grand Tamasha, October 2, 2024.

1. Rajesh Rajagopalan, “India keeps making the same foreign policy mistakes. World doesn’t think we’re being moral,” ThePrint, September 11, 2024.

1. “Looking Back at U.S.-India Relations in the Biden Era (with Ashley J. Tellis),” Grand Tamasha, September 11, 2024.

1. Rajesh Rajagopalan, “India-US ties under Modi echo Nehru’s reluctance to commit. Hope consequences aren’t the same,” ThePrint, July 17, 2024.

To discuss the latest events and what they mean for India, Milan is joined on the show this week by Grand Tamasha regulars by two Grand Tamasha regulars, Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution and Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal.

They discuss the BJP’s striking political resilience, the fortunes of the Aam Aaadmi Party, and India’s current economic malaise. Plus, they discuss Modi’s high-stakes meetings with Trump and Elon Musk and the future of the China-India-United States relationship.

Episode notes:

1. “Will India's Budget 2025 Turn the Economic Tide? (with Sumukar Ranganathan)” Grand Tamasha, February 5, 2025.

1. Sadanand Dhume, “Foreign Lessons in the Perils of DEI and Affirmative Action,” Wall Street Journal, January 29, 2025.

1. Tanvi Madan, “Top Gun and Scattershot,” Times of India, January 20, 2025.

1. Sadanand Dhume, “Manmohan Singh’s Mixed Economic Legacy,” Wall Street Journal, January 1, 2025.

1. Tanvi Madan, “India is Hoping for a Trump Bump,” Foreign Affairs, December 5, 2024.

A new book by the journalist Rollo Romig, I Am on the Hit List: A Journalist's Murder and the Rise of Autocracy in India, recounts the extraordinary life and tragic death of Gauri Lankesh. Rollo is a journalist, essayist, and critic. He has been reporting on South India since 2013, most often for The New York Times Magazine.

To talk more about his new book and his years reporting from south India, Rollo joins Milan on the show this week. They discuss Rollo’s love affair with Bangalore, Lankesh’s complex character, the shadowy rightwing organization Sanatan Sanstha implicated in her killing, and the police investigation into her death. Plus, the two discuss Gauri Lankesh’s legacy and what her murder tells us about the state of contemporary India.

Episode notes:

1. Nitish Pahwa, “A Reporter Who Risked and Lost Her Life in Modi’s India,” New York Times, August 6, 2024.

1. Rollo Romig, “How to Steal a River,” The New York Times Magazine, March 1, 2017.

1. Rollo Romig, “What Happens When a State Is Run by Movie Stars?” The New York Times Magazine, July 1, 2015.

1. Rollo Romig, “Masala Dosa to Die For,” The New York Times Magazine, May 7, 2014.

For the past two years, in anticipation of the show’s holiday hiatus, we’ve published an annual list of our favorite books featured on the podcast over the previous twelve months.

In keeping with this tradition, here—in no particular order—are Grand Tamasha’s top books of 2024.

Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva
By Janaki Bakhle. Published by Princeton University Press.

Accelerating India's Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance
By Karthik Muralidharan. Published by Penguin Viking India.

The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy (published in the United States and the UK as The New India: The Unmaking of the World’s Largest Democracy)
By Rahul Bhatia. Published by Context (South Asia); Little, Brown (UK); and PublicAffairs (United States).

In this special bonus episode, Milan talks about why he loved each of these books and includes short clips from his conversations with Janaki, Karthik, and Rahul.

This is the final episode of our twelfth season. Thanks to our listeners to being such loyal followers of the show. We’re excited to kick off our thirteenth season in mid-January after taking a short holiday break.

1. “What the Taliban Takeover Means for India (with Avinash Paliwal),” Grand Tamasha, September 15, 2021.

2. “Binalakshmi Nepram on the Realities of India’s Oft-Forgotten Northeast,” Grand Tamasha, June 3, 2020.

3. Avinash Paliwal, “Bangladesh on razor’s edge: Why India must wake up to the looming economic crisis and political instability to its east,” Indian Express, December 13, 2022.

1. 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.
2. Sandeep Shastri, Sanjay Kumar, and Suhas Palshikar, “CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey: A return to an era of genuine coalitions,” Hindu, June 6, 2024.
3. Lokniti Team, “Post-poll survey: Methodology,” Hindu, June 6, 2024.
4. Sandeep Shastri, “CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey: Modi factor seems to have stagnated over a decade,” Hindu, June 6, 2024.
5. Sanjay Kumar and Fuhaar Bandhu, “CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey: BJP maintains advantage among young voters,” June 7, 2024.
6. Lokniti Team, “CSDS-Lokniti post-poll survey: Clearing misconceptions about the post-poll survey,” Hindu, June 9, 2024.
7. “Decoding the 2024 Indian General Elections (with Sunetra Choudhury and Rahul Verma),” Grand Tamasha, June 6, 2024.
8. “Why India’s Modi Underperformed (with Ravi Agrawal, Yamini Aiyar, and Milan Vaishnav),” FP Live, June 7, 2024.
9. “India's 2024 Election—and its Aftermath (with Sadanand Dhume and Tanvi Madan),” Grand Tamasha, June 19, 2024.

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

2. Sudha Ramachandran, “Christophe Jaffrelot on What Makes Brand Modi Successful,” The Diplomat, April 8, 2024.

3. Christophe Jaffrelot, “A Deeper State,” The Caravan, February 13, 2024.

4. Christophe Jaffrelot, “The enduring personality cult of Narendra Modi,” February 13, 2024.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Karthik Muralidharan, “A New Approach to Public Sector Hiring in India for Improved Service Delivery,” India Policy Forum 12, no. 1 (2016): 187-236.

1. Rahul Bhattacharya, “Rahul Gandhi is on the march. But where is he heading?” 1843 Magazine, May 2, 2024.

2. Samanth Subramanian, “multi-storied,” Substack newsletter.

3. Bhagi Siva and Samanth Subramanian, “What it takes to live near an elephant herd,” Washington Post, January 21, 2024.

4. Samanth Subramanian, “When the Hindu Right Came for Bollywood,” New Yorker, October 10, 2022.

5. Samanth Subramanian, “How Hindu supremacists are tearing India apart,” Guardian, February 20, 2020.

2. Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “No changes to constitution, assures PM,” Hindustan Times, April 22, 2024.

3. Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “Odisha gives BJP sleepless nights,” Hindustan Times, April 18, 2024.

4. Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “Lok Sabha election manifestos: Modi’s Guarantee, Congress’s NYAY,” Hindustan Times, April 16, 2024.

5. Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “String of new BJP entrants puts focus on headhunter,” Hindustan Times, April 16, 2024.

6. Smriti Kak Ramachandran, “BJP Lok Sabha poll manifesto: A mix of welfare politics, ideological causes,” Hindustan Times, April 14, 2024.

7. “Previewing India's 2024 General Election (with Sukumar Ranganathan),” Grand Tamasha, April 17, 2024.

8. Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Why voters’ silence is making the BJP nervous,” Indian Express, April 24, 2024.

2. Pranjul Bhandari, “Beyond the budget: what happened when no one was really looking?” Mint, January 30, 2024.

3. Pranjul Bhandari, “India’s fiscal future: Lots done, more to do,” Mint, November 22, 2023.

4. Pranjul Bhandari, “India’s growth prospects are on the up. What changed?” Indian Express, December 19, 2023.

5. Pranjul Bhandari, “Building an India for manufacturers,” Indian Express, October 9, 2023.

2. Mohsin Alam Bhat and Aashish Yadav, “CAA will not help persecuted Hindus, Sikhs from neighbouring countries,” Indian Express, March 19, 2024.

3. “The Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2019,” PRS Legislative Research.

4. Madhav Khosla and Milan Vaishnav, “The Three Faces of the Indian State,” Journal of Democracy 32, no. 1 (2021): 111-125.

5. Mohsin Alam Bhat, “The Constitutional Case Against the Citizenship Amendment Bill,” Economic and Political Weekly 54, no.3 (2019): 12-14.

6. 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.

7. Niraja Gopal Jayal, “Faith-based Citizenship,” The India Forum, October 31, 2019.

2.      Michael Greenstone et al., A Roadmap Towards Cleaning India’s Air (EPIC India and Harvard Kennedy School, 2018).

3.      Michael Greenstone et al., “Can Pollution Markets Work in Developing Countries? Experimental Evidence from India,” Working Paper, January 27, 2023.

2. “Reframing Canada’s Global Engagement: Ten Strategic Choices for Decision-Makers,” Global Canada, September 2020.

3. 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.

2. Nicolas Blarel,The Evolution of India's Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

3. Sumit Ganguly and Nicolas Blarel, “Modi’s Comments on Israel-Gaza War Signal Shift,”Foreign Policy, October 12, 2023.

4. 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.

2. 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.

3. Shireen M. Rai and Carole Spary, “Populism, parliament, and performance,”Seminar752 (April 2022)

2. Ajay Mathur, “Here's how solar can help triple renewable energy by 2030,” World Economic Forum, August 14, 2023.

3. “What COP26 Means for India—and the World,” (with Navroz Dubash),Grand Tamasha, November 17, 2021.

4. “How India Can Get to Net Zero Emissions,” (with Jayant Sinha),Grand Tamasha, October 13, 2021.
 

1. Aditya Balasubramanian, “Some lessons for INDIA from the Swatantra Party,” Hindustan Times, August 31, 2023.

1. Rana Mitter, “Shadows at Noon — Joya Chatterji exposes the beating heart of south Asia,” Financial Times, August 11, 2023.

1. “Ramachandra Guha Revisits India After Gandhi,” Grand Tamasha, April 19, 2023.

1. Ashok Malik, “The continuity constituency and Modi's re-election bid,” Economic Times, August 29, 2023.

1. [VIDEO] “G20 Summit 2023 India (with Ashok Malik),” CNN-News18, September 12, 2023.

1. “Ro Khanna on the U.S.-India Partnership,” Hindustan Times, September 13, 2023.

1. “The Next Chapter in U.S.-India Defense Ties(with Lindsey Ford),”Grand Tamasha, September 5, 2023.

1. 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.

1. Arvin Alaigh, “A Reckoning for the Modi Democrats,”Dissent, December 23, 2020.

1. [VIDEO] Ely Ratner and Lindsey Ford, “Building a More Resilient Indo-Pacific Security Architecture, Hudson Institute,” March 2, 2023.

1. The White House, “Joint Statement from the United States and India,” June 22, 2023.

1. 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.

Some of our listeners may recall way back in February 2020—the month before the world came to a standstill—Milan sat down with the journalistPramit Bhattacharya to to discuss the unfolding crisis in Indian economic data. Pramit returns to the show today to discuss a new report that he’s just published with Carnegie titled, “India’s Statistical System: Past, Present, Future.”

Pramit’s new report is the single-best resource on the trials and tribulations of India’s data machinery. It contains the kind of straight-ahead reporting and analysis that people have come to expect from Pramit, who writes the “Truth, Lies, and Statistics” column forMintand the “Simply Economics” column for theHindustan Times.

Milan and Pramit discuss why it is both the best and worst of times for data users in India, how India squandered its competitive advantage in statistical data, and just exactly what today’s data crisis means for the average Indian. Plus, the two discuss Pramit’s ideas for overhauling the system.

Episode notes:

“Pramit Bhattacharya on the Crisis in India’s Economic Data,”Grand Tamasha, February 12, 2020.

Arvind Subramanian, “India's GDP Mis-estimation: Likelihood, Magnitudes, Mechanisms, and Implications,” Harvard Kennedy School Working Paper, June 2019.

Pramit Bhattacharya, “How India’s Statistical System Was Crippled,”Mint, May 7, 2019.

Pramit Bhattacharya, “Make our statistics credible again,”Mint, January 3, 2022.

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.

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:

1.     Ashley J. Tellis, “America’s Bad Bet on India,”Foreign Affairs, May 1, 2023.

2.     “U.S.-India Relations, With Ashley J. Tellis,”The President’s Inbox(podcast), May 16, 2023.

3.     Ashley J. Tellis, Bibek Debroy, and C. Raja Mohan, eds.,Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power(New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2022)

4.     Arzan Tarapore, “America’s Best Bet in the Indo-Pacific,”Foreign Affairs, May 29, 2023.

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.

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).

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

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.

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:

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

1. Happymon Jacob, “Russia is Losing India,” Foreign Affairs, September 22, 2022.
2. Sameer Lalwani and Happymon Jacob, “Will India Ditch Russia?” Foreign Affairs, January 24, 2023.
3. “The Looming Cloud of Sanctions Over U.S.-India Relations (with Sameer Lalwani),” Grand Tamasha, September 29, 2021.
4. Sameer Lalwani and Tyler Sagerstrom, “What the India–Russia Defence Partnership Means for US Policy,” Survival (2021).
5. 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.
6. Happymon Jacob, “The futility of underbalancing China,” The Indian View (newsletter), January 23, 2023.

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.

1. 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).
2. Ashley J. Tellis, “India as a Leading Power,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 4, 2016.
3. Lakshmi Puri, “The will to power: How India can become a leading power in the world,” FirstPost, January 27, 2023.
4. “Southern Asia's Nuclear Future With Ashley J. Tellis,” Grand Tamasha, October 26, 2022.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

1. Rahul Sagar, “If it doesn’t learn from the past, the West can lose India (again),” Times of India, May 22, 2022.
2. Rahul Sagar, The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao's Hints on the Art and Science of Government (London: Hurst, 2022).
3. 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).

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.

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

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.

1. “Rethinking Sri Lanka’s economic crisis,” Interview with Ahilan Kadirgamar, Himal South Asian, February 28, 2022.
2. 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).
3. Ahilan Kadirgamar, "Sri Lanka stares at bankruptcy or redemption," The Hindu, April 16, 2022.
4. Ahilan Kadirgamar. "The Political Economy of the Crisis in Sri Lanka," Economic & Political Weekly, April 30, 2022.

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. 

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.  

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

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.

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

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

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.” 

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