Grand Tamasha

Last week on the show, Milan sat down with the Carnegie Endowment’s Ashley J. Tellis to discuss his much talked about Foreign Affairs essay titled, “America’s Bad Bet on India.”In that piece, Ashley argues that if U.S. policymakers are expecting India to come to America’s aid in the event of a military conflict with China, they would be well advised to keep their expectations in check. Ashley argues that such a military coalition is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future.A month after Ashley’s piece was published, the scholar Arzan Tarapore penned a response in Foreign Affairs titled, “America’s Best Bet in the Indo-Pacific.”Arzan, a Research Scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, joins Milan on the show this week to discuss why coalition warfare is the wrong benchmark with which to assess U.S.-India security cooperation.Milan and Arzan discuss the policy differences between Delhi and Washington, the practical ways in which the United States and India can

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

Later this summer, California could be first American state to ban discrimination on the basis of caste. California’s move, and the moves by universities, cities, and towns across the country, to raise issues of caste discrimination has generated a massive controversy that is roiling the Indian American community in the United States.One reporter, the freelance journalist Sonia Paul, has been doggedly pursuing this story for years, even before it became a mainstream news issue. Sonia is an award-winning journalist, writer, producer and story editor based in Oakland, California, and she is the daughter of immigrants from India and the Philippines.Sonia joins Milan on the show this week to talk more about her reporting and the state of caste in America. Sonia and Milan discuss the difficulties of reporting on caste in America, the coded ways in which discrimination often takes place, and the debates in the Indian American community over moves to add caste as a protected category. Plus, the two discuss the fierc

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 “s

If you’ve spent any time reading books, watching movies about—or traveling to—India—chances are you’ve come across the depiction of an urban slum somewhere along the way. In most of these popular portrayals, slums are dens of inequity and deprivation. Citizens appear to be trapped in a vortex of poverty, bad governance, and corruption. In these stories, politicians and their henchmen appear to have the last laugh, extracting whatever they can from citizens who have few exit options.A new book by the political scientists Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, Migrants and Machine Politics, informs us that much of what we think we know is based on myth, not fact.Adam and Tariq join Milan on the podcast this week to discuss a decade’s worth of research in the slums of Bhopal and Jaipur. The trio discuss what slums look like from the bottom-up rather than the top-down, the realities of machine politics in India, and the surprising agency that poor citizens possess. Plus, they discuss how two trends—centralization and H

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 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 Sur and they join Milan on the show this week to talk more about their report.The trio discuss the absence of an 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 no

On May 13, the Congress Party notched a major election win—a decisive single-party majority in the southern state of Karnataka—earning the highest vote share of any party in the state since 1989. For the Congress, which is starved of election victories, this result could not have come at a better time as the country gears up for national elections early next year. The incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) put in a disappointing performance, one that is likely to prompt some soul-searching as the party regroups for another round of regional polls this fall.To unpack what happened in Karnataka and what it means—for the state and for India—Milan is joined on the podcast this week by author and journalist Sugata Srinivasaraju. Sugata is one of the most respected political journalists in Karnataka and the author of several books, including Furrows in a Field: The Unexplored Life of HD Deve Gowda.The two discuss the contours of an expensive and animated election campaign, the keys to the Congress Party’s success,

Since Independence, the Indian state has grappled with a variety of internal security challenges—insurgencies, terrorist attacks, caste and communal violence, riots, and electoral violence. Their toll has claimed more lives than all of India's five external wars combined.Despite this, we know surprisingly little about the institutions of the state tasked with managing internal security. How well has India contained violence and preserved order? How have the approaches and capacity of the State evolved to attain these twin objectives?  And what impact does the State's approach have on civil liberties and the quality of democracy?These are three questions that a new book, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State, takes up. It’s an important new volume co-edited by two of the best-known political scientists working on India—Amit Ahuja of the University of California-Santa Barbara and Devesh Kapur of Johns Hopkins-SAIS.Amit and Devesh join Milan on the podcast this week to discuss their new book

At long last, we come to that time in every Grand Tamasha season where Milan stops to round up the last news on Indian politics and policy with two longtime friends of the podcast—Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and the Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution.This week on the show, the trio discuss three topics. First, they discuss India’s passing China as the world’s most populous country and what this means for the country’s future prospects. Second, there’s been a steady drumbeat of articles and Twitter discussions about India’s role in the world, prompted in part by the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, among others. Milan, Sadanand, and Tanvi discuss the latest on Indian foreign policy. Last but not least, many scholars and analysts believe India’s democracy is moving in reverse but who exactly has the standing to debate and discuss these developments? They take on that question as well. Episode notes:Sadanand Dhume, “Will India’s Growin

Nonalignment, secularism, socialism, democracy, high modernism—these are all ideas that students of India have long associated with India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. These elements have been so embedded in the Indian psyche that we regularly speak of a “Nehruvian consensus” without thinking twice.A new book by the scholar Taylor C. Sherman, a professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, revisits this consensus and finds that all is not what it seems. These high-minded notions that we’ve long associated with Nehru are—at their core—myths. And like all good myths, there’s a kernel of truth somewhere in there but the reality is far more nuanced.Taylor joins Milan on the show this week to discuss these myths, which she’s documented in a new book, Nehru's India: A History in Seven Myths. The two discuss the disconnect between Nehru’s rhetoric and the lived realities on the ground, the trouble with the notion of a “Nehruvian consensus,” a

Find a list of the defining books about India published in the last 75 years and there’s one book that will show up on list after list after list—Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Gandhi.For years, historians approached India as if history more or less ended with the partition of the subcontinent and the achievement of India’s independence in 1947. Guha’s India After Gandhi broke this mold and, in so doing, helped to define what a generation of students, scholars, and readers understands of India in the decades after independence.This year, Picador has published the third edition of India After Gandhi, which brings the book’s narrative up to the present day with a new chapter on the post-2016 Modi era.To talk about his landmark book—and some of the themes that it covers—Ram Guha joins Milan on the podcast this week. The two discuss Gandhi’s legacy after 75 years of independence, the inspiration behind India After Gandhi, and the transformation of Indian democracy in the past decade. Plus, the two dis

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.Mody joins Milan on the podcast this week to talk more about his book. The two discuss Mody’s controversial thesis, the inadequacy of GDP as a metric of economic development, and the parallels between pre-Partition India and India of the president. Plus, the two talk

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 manipulation by New York-based investment firm Hindenburg Research. This sent Adani Group stocks plummeting while Adani’s own net worth took a massive nosedive. Today, the group is trying to calm investors and strengthen its balance sheets even as both the Supreme Court and India’s securities regulator are investing possible wrongdoing.To talk more about the Adani affair, Milan is joined on the show this week by Menaka Doshi, Senior Editor at Bloomberg News. Menaka is one of India’s most respected financial journalists. She previously served as Managing Editor of BloombergQuint and Executive Editor of CNBC-TV18.Milan and Menaka discuss the origins of the Adani Group, the allegations against them, and the future fo

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

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 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 fulfill its nucle

Thirty years ago, Seema Sirohi first moved to Washington as a journalist charged with covering India’s relationship with the United States. At the time, Washington saw India as a problem—rather than a useful part of its foreign policy solution—to big, complex global challenges. Today, the situation could not be more different: the United States and India are deeply enmeshed in a strategic partnership that runs the gamut, from space to terrorism, and from climate change to technology. Seema, a U.S.-based columnist for the Economic Times, narrates this tectonic shift in a new book, Friends with Benefits: The India-U.S. Story.On this week’s show, she joins Milan to discuss the book and her own personal journey. They discuss the evolution of U.S.-India ties over the past three decades, including the rocky years of the early 1990s, the breakthrough in the George W. Bush administration, and the setbacks towards the end of India’s UPA-2 government. Plus, the two discuss the Washington establishment’s blind spots on

Age of Vice is the blockbuster new novel by the author Deepti Kapoor. It’s a love story, wrapped inside a tale of capitalism run amok, wrapped inside a violent story of gangland politics. In nearly 600 pages, it transports readers from the badlands of eastern Uttar Pradesh to the five-star hotels and fabulous bungalows of New Delhi. To call this book a sensation would be the understatement of the year. Readers have snapped up copies, book editors have issued glowing reviews, and a television series is already in the works. Deepti Kapoor grew up in north India and worked for several years as a journalist in New Delhi. She’s the author of a previous novel, A Bad Character, published in 2015. To talk more about Age of Vice 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 p

The decline of India’s parliament is a refrain that has often been repeated over the last seventy-five years of modern Indian democracy. A new book on India’s Parliament addresses the decline thesis head-on and provides a warts-and-all assessment of India’s legislative chamber.The book is called House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy and its author is the scholar Ronojoy Sen. Ronojoy, a senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asia Studies at the National University of Singapore, joins Milan on the podcast this week to discuss the evolution of India’s parliament, the constitutional pre-history of legislative institutions in India, and the surprising lack of debate around universal suffrage. Plus, the two discuss the plague of parliamentary disruptions, the black box of conflicts of interest, and how the practice of Indian democracy transformed the institution of Parliament. Madhav Khosla and Milan Vaishnav, “The Three Faces of the Indian State,” Journal of Democracy 32, no.

On February 24, the world will commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The ongoing war has fueled considerable debate among foreign policy analysts about the long-term consequences for the nature and evolution of global order. In the wake of the ongoing conflict, few relationships have been as hotly debated as the ties between India and Russia. In the pages of Foreign Affairs, two of the best strategic minds working on Indian foreign policy—Happymon Jacob of Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Council for Strategic and Defense Research and Sameer Lalwani of the U.S. Institute of Peace—have engaged in a serious and constructive debate on what the future holds in store for India’s relations with Russia. This week, Happymon and Sameer join Milan to expand on their debate. Happymon argues that we’re seeing the beginning of decoupling between Russia and India, while Sameer is skeptical. He envisions a future in which Russia-India relations, while perhaps declining, exhibit signific

In 2016, Ashley J. Tellis published an important paper in which he unpacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for India to become a leading, rather than a balancing, power on the global stage. This call reflected an important change in how the country’s top political leadership conceived of its role in international politics.In the years following, Ashley and a group of collaborators have been working to flesh out what becoming a leading power would actually mean in practice. Their findings have finally been published in a new volume, Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power, edited by Ashley along with Bibek Debroy and C. Raja Mohan.Ashley holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. On the show this week, Ashley joins Milan to talk about his latest project. He and Milan discuss India’s internal debate about its growing global role, the ideological constraints to realizing India’s economic potential, and lingering doubts about India’s liberal commitm