Grand Tamasha

Breaking the Mould: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity is a big new book by the economists Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba. The book is both a critique of India’s development model as well as a manifesto for reform.Most notably, it challenges the conventional wisdom that India’s primary goal should be to transform the country into[...]

The third phase of India’s 44-day long polls took place this week with voting held in 94 constituencies across 12 states. Thus far, the elections have been marked by lower-than-expected turnout, intensifying communal rhetoric, and a sharp debate about inequality and redistribution.Against this backdrop, the New York Times Magazine recently published an essay by the[...]

The incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi entered this election as the clear favorite with every single pre-election survey pointing a decisive victory. However, the party is leaving no stone unturned in its effort to notch a third consecutive parliamentary majority.To discuss the BJP’s campaign, Milan is joined on the show[...]

As India heads to the polls, a new chapter is being written in a very old debate about poverty and inequality in India. This debate has been stirred up by the release of new data from a government-sponsored consumption survey, which some have argued shows a massive decline in poverty in India. Others believe that[...]

In just a few days, India’s eighteenth general elections will get underway with voting in the first phase kicking off on April 19. Between April 19 and June 1, India will have seven separate polling days culminating in a final counting of votes on June 4.Every single pre-election survey to date shows the ruling Bharatiya[...]

On March 11, the Indian Defense Research and Development Organization conducted the maiden test of its Agni-V MIRV (Multiple Independently Targetable Re-Entry Vehicle) missile. MIRV capability is a complex technology and there are only a handful of countries that have developed it.The test represents a breakthrough for India’s missile program but it’s also prompted warnings[...]

It seems wherever you turn these days, there are stories about India’s status as the fastest growing major economy in the world. Its growth rates remain the envy of both the developed—and the developing—world. But what is really happening under the hood? What are the opportunities for India in a world riven by conflict and[...]

In today’s India, there are few historical figures whose writing and thinking help explain the current ideological zeitgeist more than Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.Despite this newfound attention, Savarkar is often viewed in black and white—as a staunch Hindu nationalist who devoted his life to expounding the virtues of conservative, Hindu majority rule.A new book by the[...]

A few weeks ago, the Indian government formally notified the rules implementing the controversial 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA. The law provides persecuted religious minorities hailing from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan an expedited pathway to Indian citizenship, provided they belong to the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Parsi, or Sikh communities. Notably, the law does[...]

Zac O’Yeah is a Swedish novelist, rock musician, and author of the Majestic Trilogy—a trio of detective stories set in his adopted home of Bengaluru. And if that were not enough, he’s also the author of the brand-new book, The Great Indian Food Trip: Around a Subcontinent à la Carte.In the book, O’Yeah catalogues his[...]

Over the last several decades, there have been monumental changes in the social, economic, and political lives of Dalits, who have historically been one of the most oppressed groups in all of South Asia.A new volume edited by three leading scholars of India—Dalits in the New Millennium—examines these changes, interrogates their impacts on Dalit lives,[...]

Two weeks ago, a five-judge bench of India’s Supreme Court ruled that electoral bonds—a controversial instrument of political giving introduced by the Narendra Modi government—violated the Constitution and would immediately cease operating.Under the court’s ruling, the State Bank of India will immediately stop issuing bonds; the Election Commission of India must disclose details of all[...]

With general elections just months away, it is the era of the ten-year retrospective—a chance for India watchers to reflect on what has changed over the past decade under the Narendra Modi government—and what has not.One area especially deserving of scrutiny is India’s relations with the neighborhood. The Modi government came to power with an[...]

Last Thursday, voters in Pakistan went to the polls in the country’s first general elections since the July 2018 election that brought former prime minister Imran Khan to power. In 2022, Khan was ousted in an unprecedented no confidence vote and now finds himself behind bars.In the months before the election, Khan’s political party, Pakistan[...]

From the Obama “birther” movement in the United States to the fringe politicians who believe congestion pricing in London is part of an international “socialist plot,” it is no exaggeration to say that conspiracy theories have become part of the standard political playbook the world over.But when it comes to outlandish conspiracy theories, India stands[...]

It seems like you cannot open a newspaper, listen to a foreign policy podcast, or open Twitter/X without somebody somewhere sounding off on the emerging geopolitical battle over semiconductors. Semiconductors, which we colloquially refer to as chips, have quickly moved from the periphery to center-stage of global high politics.To discuss this high-stakes race, and India’s[...]

This week, Grand Tamasha kicks off its eleventh season with a special return guest to the podcast. The Third Way: India’s Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance is an important new book by the lawyer-scholar-and-author Rahul Matthan. Rahul is a partner at the law firm Trilegal, where he heads their technology practice. Over the past several[...]

Back in 2019, we started the Grand Tamasha podcast on a whim. India’s 2019 general elections were around the corner, and we sensed that there might be a (temporary) marketplace for a weekly audio podcast focused on Indian politics and policy for diehards hoping to keep up with the campaign action. Nearly five years later,[...]

Over the past decade, India has witnessed significant conflict within—and around—several democratic institutions meant to act as a check on executive power. One of the most important theatres of conflict has been the judiciary—more specifically, the Supreme Court.A new book by the legal scholar Gautam Bhatia, Unsealed Covers: A Decade of the Constitution, the Courts[...]

On December 3, votes were finally tallied in four Indian states which went for elections this past month—the last test parties and candidates will face before the general elections in April-May of next year. After much anticipation, Counting Day left very little to the imagination. In a big setback for the Congress Party and the opposition[...]

Anyone who has even casually glanced at the news over the past several weeks would be hard pressed to miss the plethora of headlines about north India’s air pollution crisis. Every year as late Fall rolls around, air pollution across north India—including in the nation’s capital of Delhi—climbs to levels that make life almost unlivable[...]

One of the most remarkable episodes in modern Indian history is the story of how the leaders of over 550 sovereign princely states were convinced that they should give up their independence to become a part of a free India. This monumental task of accession was carried out over weeks, not months or years.But accession[...]

In recent years, there has a growing concern that the Supreme Court of India is not firing on all cylinders. Critics have argued that the court functions in an opaque manner, exhibits excessive deference to the executive, is sluggish in concluding cases, and is hampered by an excessive reliance on super-lawyers who can get their[...]

It’s been six weeks since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to the floor of Parliament to announce that Canadian security agencies had evidence of credible allegations that Indian authorities had a hand in the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on Canadian soil in June 2023. Nijjar was a well-known activist in[...]

As the fighting between Israel and Hamas intensifies, the world is bracing for the widening of a conflict that has the potential to escalate quickly and bring in outside powers from the region and beyond.India’s position in the aftermath of the horrific Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th—and the subsequent Israeli military response—has been[...]

In September, India’s parliament passed a long-anticipated piece of legislation, known as the Women’s Reservation Bill.The bill—which sailed through both houses of Parliament within days of being introduced— reserves one-third of seats in the national parliament and the various state assemblies for women—formalizing a quota that has long existed at the local levels in India,[...]

One of the major themes of India’s G20 presidency, which concludes later this year, has been the advancement of an ambitious green transition for the 21st century.If the world’s hopes of accelerating a clean, sustainable, just, affordable, and inclusive energy transition are to come to fruition, ensuring the spread of solar power—especially to the poorest[...]

Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India is a new book on the Swatantra Party, a leading opposition party that emerged after Indian independence to contest the entrenched dominance of the Congress Party. The leaders of Swatantra imagined a conservative alternative to the left-of-center Congress, one that embraced libertarian principles and[...]

Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century is a sweeping new book by the historian Joya Chatterji. The book tells the subcontinent's story from the British Raj through independence and partition to the forging of the modern nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This is no ordinary history, however. Of course, there is plenty[...]

This August, India’s parliament passed a landmark piece of legislation, known as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. The new act provides a framework for the protection of users’ personal data and the privacy of individuals.The passage of this bill marks the culmination of a decade-long effort to frame a data privacy law—an effort that[...]

On Saturday, September 9, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi surprised observers by announcing on Day One of the G20 summit in New Delhi that all 20 member nations had achieved consensus on the New Delhi G20 Summit Leaders Declaration.The announcement capped nine months of frenzied activity which involved thousands of meetings, consultations, and side events[...]

Ro Khanna is a Member of the United States Congress who has represented California's 17th congressional district since 2017. He also serves as co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, and recently led a bipartisan delegation to India that coincided with India’s Independence Day. During their visit, the eight-member delegation met with[...]

After a long summer break, we are excited to be back with the tenth season of Grand Tamasha. To kick off our brand-new season, this week Milan sits down with the U.S. government’s point person on the U.S.-India defense relationship to discuss the next chapter in U.S.-India defense ties.Lindsey Ford is the Deputy Assistant Secretary[...]

Programming Note: This is the very last episode of Season Nine of Grand Tamasha. As is our usual, we are going to take July and August off to recharge our batteries. We will be back in September with our tenth season of podcasts, and we’re excited about the conversations we have planned for the Fall. Some[...]

Last week on the show, Milan sat down with the Carnegie Endowment’s Ashley J. Tellis to discuss his much talked about Foreign Affairs essay titled, “America’s Bad Bet on India.”In that piece, Ashley argues that if U.S. policymakers are expecting India to come to America’s aid in the event of a military conflict with China,[...]

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

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

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[...]

If you’ve spent any time reading books, watching movies about—or traveling to—India—chances are you’ve come across the depiction of an urban slum somewhere along the way. In most of these popular portrayals, slums are dens of inequity and deprivation. Citizens appear to be trapped in a vortex of poverty, bad governance, and corruption. In these[...]

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 neighboring Bangladesh, India has been home to tens of thousands[...]

On May 13, the Congress Party notched a major election win—a decisive single-party majority in the southern state of Karnataka—earning the highest vote share of any party in the state since 1989. For the Congress, which is starved of election victories, this result could not have come at a better time as the country gears[...]

Since Independence, the Indian state has grappled with a variety of internal security challenges—insurgencies, terrorist attacks, caste and communal violence, riots, and electoral violence. Their toll has claimed more lives than all of India's five external wars combined.Despite this, we know surprisingly little about the institutions of the state tasked with managing internal security. How[...]

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

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

Find a list of the defining books about India published in the last 75 years and there’s one book that will show up on list after list after list—Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Gandhi.For years, historians approached India as if history more or less ended with the partition of the subcontinent and the achievement of[...]

India 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[...]

Few stories have captured more headlines in India this year than the saga of Gautam Adani. Adani is CEO of the Adani Group and a regular fixture on the Forbes list of Global Billionaires. He was at one point the third richest man in the world.In January, Adani and his companies were accused of stock[...]

Over the decades, India has developed a reputation for having a strong society but a weak state. This bureaucratic, lumbering behemoth has especially struggled to deliver basic public goods like health, education, water, and sanitation.  But a new book by the University of Oxford political scientist Akshay Mangla, Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public[...]

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

Thirty years ago, Seema Sirohi first moved to Washington as a journalist charged with covering India’s relationship with the United States. At the time, Washington saw India as a problem—rather than a useful part of its foreign policy solution—to big, complex global challenges. Today, the situation could not be more different: the United States and India[...]

Age of Vice is the blockbuster new novel by the author Deepti Kapoor. It’s a love story, wrapped inside a tale of capitalism run amok, wrapped inside a violent story of gangland politics. In nearly 600 pages, it transports readers from the badlands of eastern Uttar Pradesh to the five-star hotels and fabulous bungalows of New[...]

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

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

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

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

The Congress Party’s Bharat Jodo Yatra has spent more than 120 days traveling the length of India from the southern city of Kanniyakumari to the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir.After traveling more than 3,500 kilometers, the march formally ended on January 30 in Srinagar. The yatra has grabbed headlines and riled up Congress supporters, but[...]

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

One of the blessings (though it sometimes feels like a curse) of hosting Grand Tamasha, Carnegie’s weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy, is that our host Milan Vaishnav ends up reading a ton of books and interviewing many authors. In what we hope will become an annual holiday tradition, Milan has made a list of[...]

To commemorate the season finale of Season Eight of Grand Tamasha, Milan welcomes back show regulars Sadanand Dhume (American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal) and Tanvi Madan (Brookings Institution) to discuss the latest developments in the world of Indian politics and policy. The trio discusses the recent elections in Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, and Delhi,[...]

This past week, voters in the state of Gujarat went to the polls to select the 182 newest members of the state assembly. While the votes will be counted on December 8, there is an aura of inevitability around the result; journalists, pundits, and polls all point toward a decisive victory by the incumbent Bharatiya[...]

In December, India will assume the presidency of the G20, an international forum comprising the world’s twenty largest economies. It’s India’s first time chairing the group, and it represents a major diplomatic and political opportunity for the government to shape perceptions around India’s role in the world and to make headway on some of its[...]

A recent controversy involving the online news site the Wire and the tech giant Meta has sparked a new debate on the media in India. The recent controversy has been something of a Rorschach test with some critics castigating digital media for playing fast and loose with the truth and others defending the media from[...]

Why do rising powers on the global stage sometimes challenge an international order that enables their growth, yet at other times support an order that constrains them? This is the core question motivating a big, new book on international order by political scientist Rohan Mukherjee. The book is titled, Ascending Order: Rising Powers and the Politics of Status[...]

This week, climate negotiators and world leaders from around 200 countries are descending on the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el Sheikh for COP27—the twenty-seventh gathering of the 197 nations that signed up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change back in 1992. As proceedings get underway, a huge question mark hangs over this[...]

Regular Grand Tamasha listeners will recall that Milan had the scholar Rahul Sagar on the podcast several months ago to talk about his new book, To Raise a Fallen People: How Nineteenth Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours. That book was a look at the nineteenth-century intellectual roots of India’s foreign policy strategy and[...]

The competitive and often antagonistic relationships between China, India, and Pakistan have roots that predate their possession of nuclear weaponry. Yet the significant transformation of the nuclear capabilities that is now underway in all three countries simultaneously complicates and mitigates their geopolitical rivalries.This is one of the central arguments advanced by a new report authored[...]

Shaili Chopra was a well-known business journalist, working for outlets such as NDTV Profit and ET Now, before she decided to leave prime-time journalism and become an entrepreneur, launching a new digital media platform—SheThePeople—dedicated to telling the untold stories of women in India and around the world.She has a new book out called, Sisterhood Economy:[...]

These days, the world of Indian politics and policy appears to be moving at warp speed—even by Indian standards. To make sense of all the latest developments out of India, this week Milan is joined by Grand Tamasha regulars—Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal, and Tanvi Madan of the[...]

Rohini Nilekani is an author and philanthropist who has worked for over three decades in India’s social sectors. She is the founder of Arghyam, a foundation for sustainable water and sanitation, and she also co-founded Pratham Books, a nonprofit which aims to enable access to reading for millions of children. With her husband Nandan, she[...]

The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern India is a moving account of love in contemporary India. The book’s author, Mansi Choksi, follows three couples across the heartland of India as they navigate boundaries—of caste, class, religion, and traditional gender norms. What follows is a tale of romance, endurance, violence, and occasionally heartbreak. The Newlyweds does[...]

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

Since their mutual independence in 1947, India and Pakistan have been locked into a fierce rivalry that shows no signs of abating anytime soon. But a new book by the political scientist Christopher Clary, The Difficult Politics of Peace: Rivalry in Modern South Asia, suggests that our traditional narrative of doom and gloom glosses over a[...]

This week we kick off the eighth season of Grand Tamasha with a very special guest. On the season premiere, Milan sits down with Ambassador Shyam Saran, former Indian foreign secretary and one of the most decorated Indian diplomats of his generation. Saran, currently a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New[...]

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

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

What kind of world power does India want to be? Few questions have been asked as often or as intensely since India’s economic take-off in the early 1990s and the corresponding rise in its foreign policy ambitions. Many of our intellectual debates seek answers to this question by looking back to the dawn of independence in[...]

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

Sri Lanka has been the site of dramatic economic and political upheaval over the past several weeks as years of economic mismanagement have resulted in rampant inflation, shortages of essential commodities, and the country’s first sovereign default in the post-independence era. The island’s dire economic conditions have spurred angry, and sometimes violent, protests which resulted in[...]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently completed a three-country, whirlwind tour of Europe. The trip began in Germany, where Modi met with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, then continued with a stop in Denmark, where he participated in the India-Nordic Summit, and wrapped up in Paris, where he sat down with newly reelected French President Emmanuel[...]

On April 11, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted from office, having suffered defeat in a dramatic no confidence vote in the national assembly. Soon after, Shehbaz Sharif—former chief minister of Punjab and brother of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif—was sworn into office as his replacement, capping a dizzying few weeks of political intrigue. To[...]

Two weeks ago, the foreign and defense ministers of the United States and India met in Washington for the fourth annual U.S.-India “2+2” Dialogue. The annual meeting has become an important focal point in the growing partnership between the United States and India, and this year’s edition received even more scrutiny than usual. For one, it[...]

One of the most vexed questions in development studies is why the poor often receive such poor government services. The development literature is littered with hundreds—if not thousands—of examples of elite capture, weak state capacity, corruption, and subversion. But a focus on the failures obscures the fact that, every once in a while, the state does[...]

Over the past two months, the southern Indian state of Karnataka has been the site of significant religious tensions as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government—and Hindu nationalist organizations associated with it—have advanced policies and issued statements that many believe have explicitly targeted Muslims in the state. From a ban on hijabs in school to calls[...]

When Ideas Matter: Democracy and Corruption in India is the title of a new book by the author Bilal Baloch. The book provides a framework for understanding how governments respond to credibility crises. We all know that governments act in their own interests—but what are those interests? How are they defined? And where do they come[...]

The last few weeks have seen a flurry of activity on the Indian politics and policy front. India has found itself front and center in the Ukraine crisis as it has repeatedly abstained from condemning the Russian invasion. Last week, in a visit that had tongues wagging, the Indian and Chinese foreign ministers met in[...]

“Water is everywhere—in the highest mountains, in the deepest ocean, in the Ganga, in sewers, within you, and in the air. But the glass of water in front of you is precious because it requires India’s volatile, varied water to be harnessed and brought to your home.” This is one of the main insights of a[...]

Last week, the results of five assembly elections were announced and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed impressive victories in four out of five contests—notching wins in Goa, Manipur, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh. In the state of Punjab, the upstart Aam Aadmi Party won a stunning victory that saw the[...]

This week, the Indian government revealed that India’s economy expanded by 5.4 percent in the third quarter of the current fiscal year, which was well below market expectations. The latest GDP print raises fresh questions about the health of the Indian economy at a time when global headwinds are starting to pick up. Russia’s invasion[...]

Late last week, Russia launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, deploying the might of the Russian military to conduct a hostile takeover of its sovereign neighbor. Over the past few days, India’s role has received significant attention as it has neither condoned Russia’s behavior nor condemned it in the strongest terms. India has a long[...]

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, died nearly six decades ago, but it is remarkable how much his legacy continues to color modern Indian life. From the border dispute with China to debates over fundamental rights and Hindu-Muslim relations, the current policy discourse in India cannot be disentangled from Nehru’s own ideological convictions and those who[...]

On February 1, the Union government presented its budget for the upcoming fiscal year—setting the tone for its midterm pivot as the government turns toward 2024 and the end of its  second term in office. What are the biggest takeaways from this year’s budget? How did the markets receive it? And what does it tell us[...]

Due to scheduling conflicts, there is no new episode of Grand Tamasha this week. A new episode of Grand Tamasha will air next Tuesday at 9:00 PM EST/Wednesday 7:30 AM IST.Most of our listeners do not need an introduction to the Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. You’ve watched his movies. You’ve sung the songs his[...]

India’s Path to Power: Strategy in a World Adrift is a manifesto written by eight of India’s leading public intellectuals that seeks to chart a future course for Indian’s foreign policy. But, unlike most foreign policy reports, it delves into thorny issues of economics, climate change, global governance, and India’s domestic politics. This week on the[...]

On Sunday, January 23, India reported more than 333,000 active COVID cases while the official number of fatalities surpassed 500 deaths. What is the state of COVID in India today? What lessons has this pandemic imparted? And what, if anything, does COVID mean for the future of economics and politics in the country. To discuss these[...]

This week, we conclude Season Six of Grand Tamasha with a bang. Before Milan was a podcast host, he was a podcast consumer. And two of his favorite India podcasts are “The Seen and the Unseen” with Amit Varma and “Ideas of India” with Shruti Rajagopalan. So, what better way to end our season than[...]

Most of our listeners do not need an introduction to the Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan. You’ve watched his movies. You’ve sung the songs his films have popularized. You might even have had his poster on your wall growing up. A new book by the economist Shrayana Bhattacharya, Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India's Lonely Young Women and the[...]

Ambassador Nirupama Rao has had the kind of career that every Indian Foreign Service aspirant dreams of. In 2011, she retired as foreign secretary to the Government of India, the most senior position in the foreign service. She has served as spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs, ambassador to Sri Lanka, ambassador to China,[...]

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

We are nearly done with our sixth season of Grand Tamasha and we have been shamefully overdue in scheduling a news round-up for the Fall.To set things straight and to discuss the latest news coming out of India, Milan is joined on the podcast this week by Grand Tamasha regulars Sadanand Dhume of AEI and[...]

After two, torturous weeks of around-the-clock negotiations at the COP26 Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, diplomats from nearly 200 countries agreed to accelerate their commitments to reduce carbon emissions, phase out fossil fuels, and ramp up aid to poor countries, many of whom are the biggest victims of the climate crisis.  However, not everyone is pleased[...]

For more than fifteen years, the scholar Mukulika Banerjee has been deeply embedded in the social and political life of two villages in the state of West Bengal—studying developments there, both during elections and between them. Her new book, “Cultivating Democracy: Politics and Citizenship in Agrarian India,” is a deeply researched study of Indian democracy[...]

On February 14, 2019, a suicide bomber crashed into an Indian paramilitary convoy in Pulwama, Kashmir, killing forty Indian soldiers. The attack was the deadliest assault on Indian security personnel in Kashmir in three decades and captured the attention of domestic and international headlines. It also led to a nationalist fervor that fueled, in part,[...]

Spy Stories: Inside the Secret World of the RAW and the ISI  is the brand new book by investigative journalists Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark. Spy Stories relies on unprecedented access to top military and intelligence officials in both India and Pakistan to shed light on some of the most consequential crises in recent South[...]

Joanna Slater is a veteran journalist who served as the Washington Post India bureau chief based in New Delhi from 2018-2021. She was posted there during one of the most consequential periods in recent Indian history—covering the 2019 general elections, the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pegasus hacking revelations, and[...]

In a few weeks, climate negotiators from around the world will descend on Glasgow, Scotland, for the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP 26. Amid dire warnings from climate scientists about our warming planet and desperate calls for stepped-up action, India finds itself at the center of the conversation. At home, Indians[...]

French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot’s new book, Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, is a comprehensive exploration of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—its origins, policies, philosophy, and relationship to democracy. Patrick Heller of Brown University calls the book “the most detailed, theoretically sophisticated, and comprehensive analysis[...]

Last week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his maiden visit to Washington under the new Biden administration. It was all sunlight and good vibes and—for a week—American and Indian policymakers ignored the fact that a darkening cloud is gathering over U.S.-India relations in the form of potential U.S. sanctions. Milan’s guest on the show this[...]

This week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives in Washington for his first in-person meeting in the American capital with U.S. President Joe Biden. Modi, Biden, and the leaders of Australia and Japan will also be gathering for an in-person edition of the Quad Leader’s summit. To understand what’s on the agenda and what it means[...]

It’s been a month since the fall of Kabul and the sudden Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. In the intervening weeks, policymakers the world over have been scrambling to understand the reasons for the sudden collapse of the Afghan government, the real aims of the new Taliban regime, and the geopolitical implications of this crisis for[...]

One year ago, Chinese and Indian forces traded blows in the remote Galwan Valley—resulting in the first deaths along the Line of Actual Control since 1975. Months later, India would be hit by the coronavirus, whose precise origin story in China we still do not fully understand. Indian public opinion towards China has soured and[...]

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

Note: Milan’s interview with Arora Akanksha took place on June 18. On June 19, the United Nations General Assembly formally approved a second term for the incumbent António Guterres—officially bringing the selection process to a close. Earlier this month, the United Nations Security Council recommended the reelection of António Guterres as secretary-general, virtually assuring the Portuguese[...]

In India, there are growing signs that the country is slowly exiting the second wave of the COVID crisis as people get back to work, localities lift lockdown restrictions, and markets reopen. But the second wave leaves behind a trail of devastation, loss, and widespread anger. And Indians may not have much time to enjoy[...]

A troubling surge in hate crimes and discrimination targeting Asian Americans has hit the headlines in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The violence has cast a newfound spotlight on the bigotry many Asian immigrant populations experience in the United States.While Indian Americans have not borne the brunt of the discrimination of the COVID era,[...]

This week on the show, Milan is joined by Grand Tamasha news round-up regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution. This week, Milan, Sadanand, and Tanvi discuss the political state of affairs in India in the wake of recent state elections, the foreign[...]

In the early 1990s, India legislated sweeping new gender quotas in local government in the hopes that women’s political empowerment would help to rectify centuries-old social and economic inequalities. But, despite these moves, we know surprisingly little about whether and how quotas have undone entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies around the world.A new book[...]

One of the enduring puzzles about the tragic second wave of COVID is how India, the world’s largest vaccine producer, faces an alarming shortage of vaccines. A new essay by the journalist Samanth Subramanian for the online news organization Quartz argues that there’s no single answer, but rather a “timeline of dysfunction” marked by what he[...]

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Biden administration has been in office for just a little over two months but India has already emerged as an important foreign policy priority for the president and his new team. But what do the United States and India seek to do together? What is the significance of this month’s leadership-level Quad summit? And,[...]

Rasputin, Lucifer, Evil Genius, Sombre Porcupine, The World’s Most Hated Diplomat. These are just some of the choice names that people have given for the former diplomat and politician V.K. Krishna Menon.   Menon is, in many ways, one of the most consequential figures in post-Independence India and he is the subject of a recent book[...]

This week on the podcast, Milan is joined once more by Grand Tamasha “news round-up” regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution. This week, the trio discuss three topics: last week’s heads-of-state summit of the “Quad” countries; recent, controversial assessments on the health of Indian democracy;[...]

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

In September 2020, Indian lawmakers approved three controversial agriculture bills amidst an uproar on the floor of Parliament. That uproar would soon manifest outside of Parliament as tens of thousands of farmers took to the streets on the outskirts of Delhi to protest the passage of these laws. Today, the government and the farmers are[...]

One night in the summer of 2014, two teenage girls living in a remote village in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh went missing. Hours later, they were found dead and hanging from a tree in a mango orchard. A media frenzy ensued that propelled the case to the front pages of national newspapers[...]

As a new administration takes office in Washington, followers of the U.S.-India relationship are eagerly anticipating what shape ties between these two nations will take under a new president. A new book by the journalist Meenakshi Ahamed, A Matter of Trust: India–US Relations from Truman to Trump, offers a sweeping portrait of this relationship over[...]

Indian Americans are now the second-largest immigrant group in the United States. Their growing political influence and their courtship by the Indian government raises important—as yet unanswered—questions. How do Indians in America regard India, and how do they remain connected to developments there? What are their attitudes toward Indian politics and changes underway in their[...]

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

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

By now, we are all familiar with the catch phrases, colorful billboards, and slick branding: Incredible India. India Shining. Make in India. New India.   But these are not just the frivolous creations of marketing executives and tourist brochures—they are the stuff of 21st century nation branding. This is the argument of a new book by[...]

Although this history has largely been forgotten today, India was the epicenter of three major pandemics throughout the 19th and early 20th century.  A new book by the economist Chinmay Tumbe, The Age of Pandemics: 1817-1920—How They Shaped India and the World, takes readers on a tour of three previous pandemics—cholera, the plague, and influenza—that ravaged[...]

Of the many questions being asked about U.S. president-elect Joe Biden’s foreign policy, chief among them is how the new president might handle relations with China. The future trajectory of U.S.-China relations matters not just for the U.S. and China, but it also has real implications for India—its economics, politics, and foreign policy.On the podcast this[...]

Last week, the world saw two highly anticipated elections come to an end. The never-ending 2020 U.S. presidential election finally came to a close—with Democratic challenger and former Vice President Joe Biden capturing the White House. On the other side of the world, tens of millions of voters went to the polls in the north Indian[...]

Thanks to the COVID-19 crisis, India’s economy is expected to shrink by at least 9 percent this fiscal year—a gut punch that comes on the heels of several years of continuously slowing growth. At the heart of India’s economic woes is a severe banking crisis that some have argued has sapped the vitality out of[...]

Since the onset of the novel Coronavirus, award-winning data journalist Rukmini has investigated the virus’ spread in India like very few people have.  Twice a week since March, she’s been recording her thoughts on the pandemic in a short “mini-podcast” called The Moving Curve.  In 100 bite-sized episodes, Rukmini has helped educate Indians--and their political leaders--about this[...]

Pankaj Mishra is the acclaimed author of numerous books of fiction and non-fiction. He is a frequent contributor to some of the world’s top publications the New York Times, New York Review of Books, Guardian, the New Yorker, and Bloomberg.   His new book, Bland Fanatics: Liberals, Race, and Empire, focuses on the decay of Western[...]

In the summer of 2008, the journalist Ananth Krishnan moved to Beijing to pick up some Mandarin. Little did he know that this fateful decision would kick off a decade-long immersion in Chinese politics, economics, foreign policy, and culture.  This week on the podcast, Ananth talks with Milan about his new book, “India’s China Challenge: A[...]

Although Indians in America account for less than one percent of registered voters, this election season they have been actively wooed by both Democrats and Republicans in an unprecedented manner. Thanks to the increasing political influence of Indian Americans, the camaraderie between Donald Trump and Narendra Modi, and the addition of Kamala Harris to the Democratic[...]

The political landscape of South Asia has changed dramatically in the last two decades. Insurgencies that were raging across the subcontinent in the 1990s and early 2000s have largely been contained and the heavy-hand of the state has enjoyed a remarkable resurgence. Why has this happened and what exactly does it mean for South Asia’s[...]

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

For the first time in decades, shots have been fired between China and India along the Line of Actual Control. As India grapples with the twin domestic crises of COVID and the economy, it simultaneously must manage a complex diplomatic and defense engagement with the Chinese. This week on this show, Milan sits down with the[...]

This week on Grand Tamasha, Milan is joined by podcast regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution to discuss the triple-whammy of crises facing India. The three discuss the latest on India’s contested border with China, the raging COVID pandemic--which shows very[...]

Scaachi Koul is an Indo-Canadian culture writer at Buzzfeed and the author of the 2017 book of essays, “One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter.” For those of you who spend any time on social media, you will know Scaachi is a force of nature--dishing out sharp-witted takes on cultural and[...]

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

On August 15, 2020, India celebrated its 73rd birthday. To reflect on the state of Indian democracy and to kick off the podcast’s fourth season, Pratap Bhanu Mehta joins Milan for a wide-ranging conversation on India’s past, present, and future.Pratap is a professor of political science at Ashoka University and contributing editor and columnist at[...]

The police in India, as in America, face a reckoning. From the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests to the Delhi riots and the COVID pandemic, recent events have raised troubling questions about the quality of Indian policing. In 2019, the non-profit Common Cause and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies issued a report on[...]

Here’s a hard truth about policy conversations on India: we rarely hear about India’s northeast. In fact, in doing more than 50 episodes of this podcast, not even one has been dedicated to the northeastern region of the country. The Northeast is a region of immense geostrategic importance. It is home to nearly 50 million Indian[...]

Two weeks ago, the Modi government announced a series of economic measures intended to get the Indian economy back on track after the country’s prolonged lockdown in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.Over five days, the Finance Minister addressed a series of daily press conferences in which she outlined the government’s plan of action to[...]

This week, Milan sits down with podcast regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution for a special live edition of the Grand Tamasha news round-up. The three discuss India's emerging response to the coronavirus, its economic fallout, and the ramifications for India's[...]

YOU'RE INVITED: Join Milan, Tanvi, and Sadanand for a special LIVE episode of Grand Tamasha on Tuesday, May 19, at 11am EST / 8:30pm IST. Tune in as they break down the week's news - and join the live chat to ask questions! Add it to your calendar, and join the live show here.  

This week on the show, Milan is joined by New York Times journalist Sopan Deb--author of the brand-new memoir, Missed Translations: Meeting the Immigrant Parents Who Raised Me. Whether it’s Hasan Minhaj’s comedy--OR the spectacle of the “Howdy, Modi” rally in Houston--OR Aarti Shahani’s heartbreaking memoir--listeners of this show know that getting inside the Indian immigrant[...]

YOU'RE INVITED: Join Milan, Tanvi, and Sadanand for a special LIVE episode of Grand Tamasha on Tuesday, May 19, at 11am EST / 8:30pm IST. Tune in as they break down the week's news - and join the live chat to ask questions! Add it to your calendar, and join the live show here. After a[...]

In a much cited 2009 essay, economist Lant Pritchett argued that India is not a failed or a failing state, but a flailing one. In Pritchett’s words, India is “a nation-state in which the head, that is the elite institutions at the national level remain sound and functional but this head is no longer reliably[...]

This week, Milan sits down with podcast regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution for a special “Happy Hour” edition of the “Grand Tamasha” news round-up.The three discuss how India is faring in its pitched battle against the Coronavirus, the reasons behind[...]

India is in the middle of an unprecedented 21-day countrywide lockdown as it tries to contain the growing threat of Coronavirus. This virus has wrought so much fresh destruction but it also has the potential to exacerbate pre-existing inequalities in Indian society.This week on the show, Milan speaks with Amitabh Behar, the Chief Executive Officer[...]

When it comes to the matter of relations between India and Pakistan, you’ve heard all of the familiar tropes. Two nuclear-armed rivals with hundreds of thousands of troops amassed along a contested border. A Hindu-majority India pre-destined to be at odds with a Muslim-majority Pakistan. A vibrant democracy in the east, a military-dominated polity in[...]

If you listen to National Public Radio, chances are you’ve heard the journalist Aarti Shahani report on some of the biggest technology stories in the world. Microsoft. Google. Apple. Facebook. Aarti has covered them all.But there’s one story you may not have heard of--and that is Aarti’s own. In a new memoir, Here We Are:[...]

In the wake of her mother's untimely death, a young woman from Bangalore--born into a life of privilege--drops everything and travels to the opposite end of India--to the state of Jammu and Kashmir--to search for a long-lost figure from her childhood--an enigmatic Kashmiri man named Bashir Ahmed.What follows is a tale of romance, intrigue, conflict,[...]

Since the end of the Cold War, it has become commonplace to view America’s relationship with India through the prism of China. But a new book by the Brookings Institution scholar Tanvi Madan argues that China’s centrality to U.S.-India relations is hardly a product of the past few decades.Tanvi’s new book, Fateful Triangle: How China[...]

In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) published a list of the 15 most polluted cities in the world. 14 of the 15 were in India. This is a troubling statistic that has been repeated ad nauseam in the media, by environmental advocates, and by concerned citizens of the country. But what are the causes[...]

This week, Milan sits down with podcast regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution for the first “Grand Tamasha” news round-up of 2020.The three discuss President Trump’s whirlwind, 36-hour visit to India, the ghastly Delhi riots that coincided with his trip, and[...]

If the poor represent a majority of voters in India, why doesn’t this electoral power translate into better quality government services? Why are some vulnerable communities able to secure development from the state while others fail?These are some of the big questions that political scientists Adam Auerbach and Gabi Kruks-Wisner shed light on in this[...]

India is home to over 200 million Dalits, formerly known as “untouchables,” who have historically occupied the bottom rung of the Hindu caste hierarchy. In recent decades, however, Dalits have experienced unprecedented political and social mobilization.But, across India’s states, the collective action undertaken by this historically marginalized community has been highly uneven--this is the argument[...]

“The credibility of India’s official statistics has hit rock-bottom in recent years.” This is the conclusion reached by Milan’s guest on the show this week, Pramit Bhattacharya. Today, economists openly question the sanctity of India’s GDP growth figures. The government has chosen to scrap or suppress economic surveys it has conducted when they have thrown[...]

In 2015, the historian Ramachandra Guha wrote an essay in the Indian magazine Caravan that ruffled a lot of feathers. Guha remarked that while India had a right-wing party in power, the country lacked a serious right-wing intellectual ecosystem.A new book by the author and entrepreneur Jerry Rao argues that India in fact has a[...]

On January 26, 2020—Republic Day—India celebrated the 70th anniversary of its landmark Constitution. This milestone comes at a time when India is engaged in an intense, contested, and sometimes violent, debate over India’s constitutional values and what it means to be truly Indian.It is for this reason that a new book by the scholar Madhav Khosla on[...]

On January 10, the newly passed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) officially came into force. The act provides for an expedited pathway to citizenship for illegal migrants from a number of non-Muslim faiths hailing from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan and who seek refuge in India. The act has prompted intense protests across cities and towns in[...]

On the season two finale of Grand Tamasha, Milan sits down with podcast regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and the Brookings Institution’s Tanvi Madan to round up this month’s political news from India. First, Milan and his guests discuss the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the[...]

One of the most reliable laments about Indian defense policy is that the Government of India spends far too little on defense. Experts say this is a problem for at least two reasons. First, India lags behind many of its strategic competitors when it comes to spending—which only deepens the country’s asymmetry in capabilities. Second,[...]

90 percent of the world’s pharmaceutical market is comprised of generic drugs. Generics have been hailed as low-cost alternatives to their more expensive brand-name counterparts, thereby providing low-income patients around the world with affordable medicines.An explosive new book, Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom, by journalist Katherine Eban demolishes this[...]

Over the years, one could fill a small library with books that have been written about how Indian democracy survived against all of the odds—inequality, poverty, a difficult neighborhood, and a sprawling geography. Somewhat surprisingly, however, very few books have been written about the role the military has played—or not played—as it were. Many of[...]

This week on Grand Tamasha, Milan sits down with the writer Aatish Taseer, an award-winning author who writes extensively about India and South Asia in his growing body of fiction and non-fiction writing. His most recent book, “The Twice Born: Life and Death on the Ganges,” is part travelogue, part social commentary, and part autobiographical[...]

There is arguably no more consequential generation to the future of India than today’s millennials. The median age of India’s population is just 28 years old. This means that Indian millennials number around 400 million--roughly one-third of the entire Indian population. By the year 2021, two-thirds of India’s population will be within the working age[...]

Milan talks with Snigdha Poonam, national affairs reporter for the Hindustan Times, on the startling rise of truly outrageous scams across India. Through a series of eye-popping investigations, Snigdha and her colleagues have mastered the art of exposing extraordinary scams involving ordinary people in India. They have uncovered call center scams, insurance scams, exam scams,[...]

Milan sits down with podcast regulars Tanvi Madan (Brookings Institution) and Sadanand Dhume (American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal) to round up this month’s news. This month’s round up tackles three topics. Last week, voters elected new state governments in Haryana and Maharashtra in the first polls since May’s general election. Milan, Sadanand, and[...]

When Narendra Modi campaigned for India’s top job in 2014, he contrasted the incumbent Congress Party’s “politics of welfare” with the BJP’s preferred approach, which emphasized the “politics of growth.” Modi and the BJP famously dismissed the Congress government’s emphasis on entitlements, arguing that--if brought to power--it would prioritize empowerment. Five years later, the BJP[...]

When India went to the polls in the Spring of 2019, there were few states that election observers were watching more closely than the state of West Bengal. Home to 100 million Indians and responsible for 42 seats in Parliament, West Bengal is always a state worth watching. Yet, this time was different. For decades,[...]

For nearly twenty years, relations between the United States and India have been on the upswing. Once a nuclear pariah and a country tagged as an important partner of the former Soviet Union, India has steadily grown closer to America since the start of the George W. Bush administration.This week, Milan talks with Ashley J.[...]

This week on the podcast, Milan and executive producer Lauren Dueck take listeners deep in the heart of Texas and inside the gargantuan “Howdy, Modi!” rally held in Houston on September 22nd. Milan and Lauren speak with three Indians residing in Houston about their experiences taking in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President[...]

EAM Subrahmanyam Jaishankar stopped at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the first day of his whirlwind trip through Washington, DC. We were lucky enough to record the conversation, which was hosted by Carnegie President William J. Burns, and Ashley J. Tellis. Today we're sharing the minister's remarks in full, along with a selection[...]

On this week’s podcast, Milan sits down with Grand Tamasha regulars Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution to round up the latest news on Indian politics and policy.The two begin by dissecting the massive, 50,000 person “Howdy, Modi” rally held over the weekend[...]

Milan speaks with Prashant Jha, opinion editor at the Hindustan Times and author of the book, How the BJP Wins: Inside India’s Greatest Election Machine. So many election analysts, journalists, and political scientists failed to predict the massive mandate that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claimed in the 2019 general[...]

Milan speaks with Niha Masih of the Washington Post about the ongoing political drama surrounding the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam. Nearly 33 million residents of Assam applied to have their names included on the register, which was intended to distinguish between who was a legitimate resident of the state of the Assam[...]

Last week on the podcast, Milan talked with journalist Rahul Pandita about the Indian government’s decision to abrogate Article 370 of the Constitution, which grants the state of Jammu and Kashmir semi-autonomous status. According to Rahul, while many Kashmiris are up in arms over the government’s decision, many residents quietly support the move. This week,[...]

Milan sits down with journalist Rahul Pandita to talk about the situation in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. Rahul has an intense personal connection to the state—he was just fourteen years old when he and his Kashmiri Pandit family were forced into exile. He speaks with Milan about a recent reporting trip he[...]

This week on the Grand Tamasha podcast, we bring you some special bonus content--a conversation Milan recorded with political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot in June 2019 in the aftermath of the momentous Indian general election. Christophe is one of the world’s best-known scholars of India, having written some of the field’s foundational texts dissecting caste politics[...]

In the season premiere, Milan hosts an end-of-summer news round-up with Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution. Milan and his guests discuss three topics: the Modi government’s decision to abrogate Section 370 of the Indian Constitution granting semi-autonomous status to Jammu and Kashmir,[...]

First, Milan sits down with Richard (Rick) Rossow who holds the Wadhwani Chair in U.S.-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. With years of experience in the private sector as well as in the think tank world, Rick follows India’s trade and investment scenario India more closely than[...]

First, Milan sits down with Uttam Kumar of the Hindustan Times to discuss the state of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the heels of its second consecutive election victory. Uttam and Milan discuss the role that Amit Shah, the longtime confidant of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and newly inaugurated Union Home Minister, will play[...]

First, Milan sits down with Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal to discuss the Modi government’s Cabinet picks. Sadanand and Milan discuss the two most notable additions to the Cabinet—Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar and Home Minister (and BJP Party President) Amit Shah. The two also discuss the issue of[...]

First, Grand Tamasha's Executive Producer Lauren Dueck takes the helm to interview Milan on the election aftermath. Milan and Lauren discuss whether the election marks a structural break in Indian electoral history and what, if any, impact the economy had on the outcome. The two also discuss whether secularism has a leg to stand on[...]

Milan talks to Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution about the BJP's victory in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. We'll be back in your feed at our regularly scheduled time next week.

First, the new national political editor of the Hindustan Times Sunetra Choudhury joins Milan to round up this week’s news. Sunetra reflects on some of her key takeaways from the 2019 campaign and how, if at all, this year’s election broke new ground. The two also discuss the recent electoral turmoil in West Bengal and[...]

First, James Crabtree of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and author of the best-selling book, The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age, joins Milan to talk about his recent campaign trip to Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. The two discuss the pitched battle in UP, the impact of Priyanka[...]

First, Max Rodenbeck and Alex Travelli of the Economist South Asia bureau join Milan to discuss the newspaper’s recent editorial arguing that while BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi “has been neither as good for India as his cheerleaders foretold, nor as bad as his critics…imagined,” the risks associated with a Modi-led BJP still outweigh the[...]

This week on the Grand Tamasha podcast, Neelanjan Sircar of Ashoka University and the Centre for Policy Research joins Milan for our weekly news roundup. The two discuss Neelanjan’s recent column on the epic electoral battle in the crucial heartland state of Uttar Pradesh, whose 80 seats hold the key to the next government. Milan[...]

This week on the Grand Tamasha podcast, Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution join Milan to discuss the latest news from the campaign trail. The three discuss the BJP’s controversial nomination of Sadhvi Pragya and the criticism of the Election Commission’s management of the polls. The three[...]

This week we are doing something a little different. Milan Vaishnav sits down with the new Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) to the Government of India, Dr. Krishnamurthy Subramanian. Milan had talked with Subramanian at the Georgetown University India Ideas Conference, hosted by the Georgetown India Initiative in partnership with the Federation of Indian Chambers of[...]

First, Milan sits down with Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and Wall Street Journal. In a recent column, Sadanand writes that “an outcome that appeared uncertain a few months ago looks exceedingly likely: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, is poised to win a second term.” Milan[...]

First, Milan sits down with Roshan Kishore, data and political economy editor at the Hindustan Times. They discuss the Congress Party’s newly unveiled manifesto and its economic centerpiece - a new minimum income support scheme (called “NYAY”, or Nyuntam Aay Yojana).The two also discuss the tensions between the Congress and Left parties in light of[...]

First, Milan sits down with Irfan Nooruddin, the Hamad bin Khalifa Professor of Indian Politics in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and Director of the Georgetown India Initiative. Milan and Irfan discuss the first week of official campaigning—including ticket selection by the major parties, the state of alliances, and[...]

First, Milan sits down with Reuben Abraham, CEO and senior fellow at the IDFC Institute in Mumbai. A Kerala native who has lived and worked in Hyderabad and now calls Mumbai home, Reuben talks to Milan about the electoral salience of corruption, alliance politics, and recent political developments in southern India. Then, Milan sits down[...]

First, Milan Vaishnav sits down with Roshan Kishore (Data and Political Economy Editor, Hindustan Times) to discuss the latest economic figures from India. The Government of India reported that GDP growth in the third quarter of 2019 clocked in at 6.6 percent—the slowest pace in five quarters. India’s GDP growth forecast for 2018-19 has also[...]

Milan Vaishnav talks about the aftermath of the recent conflict between India and Pakistan and its ramifications for India's domestic politics and foreign policy with Alyssa Ayres (Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations) and Rezaul Hasan Laskar (Foreign Editor, Hindustan Times). Although major hostilities have paused, tensions between the two neighbors remain high. But as[...]

This week on Grand Tamasha, Milan Vaishnav sits down with Sadanand Dhume (Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute and Wall Street Journal columnist) and Sukumar Ranganathan (Editor-in-Chief, Hindustan Times) to discuss the aftermath of India’s targeted military strikes against Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist camps in Pakistan. The strikes were a direct response to the tragic February 14[...]

Grand Tamasha debuts February 27! Here's a taste of what's coming up. Every week Milan will break down the biggest news with fellow experts in Indian politics, and interview an important guest on topics that transcend the headlines.