Backpocket Pod

Why do Indian voters elect candidates with criminal records? And what does it tell us about the health of the world's largest democracy? In this episode of Backpocket Pod, I sit down with Milan Vaishnav, Senior Fellow and Director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author of "When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics." We move from political...

Yamini Aiyar is one of India's most respected scholars of governance, state capacity, and public policy. She was President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi from 2017 to 2024, and in 2008 founded its Accountability Initiative, known for pioneering one of India's largest expenditure tracking surveys for elementary education. She is currently Visiting S...

Kanti Bajpai is one of India's most respected scholars of international relations and a leading authority on India-China relations. He served as the Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore from 2011 to 2025, and is now Emeritus Professor there. He is currently Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progre...

Ananya Vajpeyi is an intellectual historian and political theorist, and a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. Educated at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the University of Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), and the University of Chicago (PhD), her work bridges political thought, philology, and public life. She is the author of Righteous Republic, an award-winning...