Grand Tamasha

Rubio’s Visit and India’s Strategic Choices U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent visit to India comes at a moment of uncertainty about the future of U.S.-India bilateral ties—and the wider international order. As New Delhi carefully navigates ties with Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, how can it preserve its freedom of action while advancing its interests? And does India have the capabilit...

China remains one of the most consequential—and most difficult—foreign policy challenges facing India today.  Even as tensions along the border persist, New Delhi is cautiously rethinking economic ties with Beijing. This rethink, in turn, is taking place against a broader change in the strategic environment as Washington rethinks its own relationship with China. Few people in India have thoug...

China and India represent two of the most important forces reshaping the global economy, but they have arrived at this moment having followed very different paths. China surged ahead through manufacturing, exports, and an activist, but authoritarian state. India, by contrast, followed a more uneven path, shaped by democracy, a robust services sector, and a different relationship between government...

This week, Grand Tamasha is launching a new four-part series on energy and climate issues in collaboration with  CASI —the Center for the Advanced Study of India—at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the next several months, we will be putting a spotlight on some of the most pressing energy and climate issues facing India—from India’s green transition to the effect of climate on its coastli...

Few subjects are as central to the functioning of government—or as likely to make the average citizen’s eyes glaze over—as how governments collect and spend the public’s money. But public finance shapes nearly every interaction Indian citizens have with the state.  How much tax revenue will my state receive from the Centre? Will my local government have the resources to invest in the urban am...

Nearly eight decades after the partition of British India, Indians and Pakistanis still view one another with deep suspicion—and their perceptions of the wider world are increasingly divergent as well.  New data collected by the Pew Research Center  offer a revealing snapshot of how people across South Asia view their neighbors, major powers like the United States and China, and India’s...

This week, Grand Tamasha commemorates the release of our 300th episode. We started this show as an experiment in the run-up to India’s 2019 general elections. Seven years and 300 episodes later, we’re still around, and no one is more surprised than we are. While India has changed in many ways over the past seven years, one constant has been our occasional  Grand Tamasha  roundtables...

The history of India’s independence is often told through a familiar set of stories: the end of the British Raj, the trauma of Partition, Nehru’s “tryst with destiny” speech, and the birth of two new nations at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. But the India that emerged eight decades ago was far from a finished product.  In the final weeks before independence, the subcontinent remai...

Over the summer, thousands of young Indians took to the streets to demand sweeping reforms of the higher education sector. This unexpected wave of Gen Z mobilization was catalyzed by the emergence of the Cockroach Janata Party, a satirical meme that blossomed into a national movement. Protests that began over the state of higher education soon tapped into something much larger: growing frustration...

Most conventional accounts of the origins of liberalism in India typically begin and end with the British. Indian thinkers are often depicted as encountering liberal ideas through colonial institutions, adapting them to local conditions, and eventually turning them against the British Raj.  But a new book by  Rahul Sagar ,  The Birth of Indian Liberalism: Mama Parmanand’s Letters to an Indian Raja...

The making of India’s Constitution is usually told as the story of the few hundred prominent lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals who comprised the Constituent Assembly—the body tasked with drafting this historic document between 1946 and 1949. But a new book by the scholars  Rohit De  and  Ornit Shani ,  Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History , argues this familiar account c...

For decades, the H-1B visa program has been the centerpiece of America’s high-skilled immigration system.  To its defenders, it is a vital pipeline that brings talented workers from around the world to power the U.S. economy. But, to its critics, it is a system rife with abuse—one that can undermine American workers while also trapping foreign workers in exploitative arrangements. A new book,  Wil...

In democracies, we typically assume that public opinion on issues like jobs, the economy, and inflation matter for shaping policy and politics. But opinions on foreign policy are often treated as the preserve of elites, especially in a country like India. Yet, it turns out that we know surprisingly little about what ordinary Indians think about foreign policy, how stable those views are, and wheth...

India’s relations with Europe are often viewed through the lens of Brussels, Paris, Berlin, or London. But in recent years, India has also been deepening its ties with another important set of partners: the Nordic countries. Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi traveled to Oslo for the third India-Nordic Summit, bringing together India and the five Nordic countries—Norway, Sweden, Finland, Icela...

After the latest round of state elections, India’s political landscape looks more lopsided than at any time in the post-2014 era. The BJP claimed big wins in West Bengal and Assam—continuing its march across eastern India and solidifying its status as a hegemonic party. But politics at home is only part of the story.  Overseas, India is facing a turbulent moment—from the Iran war and Pakistan’s di...

India’s growth numbers shape how we understand everything from jobs to investment to global standing. But what if those numbers don’t tell the full story?  New research suggests India may have both underestimated and overestimated growth at different moments over the past two decades. That insight opens the door to a broader conversation about India’s macroeconomic choices, from exchange rate poli...

For more than a decade, India has steadily deepened its ties with the Gulf while trying to balance competing interests across the region. But today, that strategy is under strain—thanks to the Iran conflict, shifting regional alignments, a reemerging Pakistan.  How is India being impacted by the Iran crisis? And what do these geopolitical shifts mean for India’s West Asia policy?  To discuss these...

** NOTE TO LISTENERS: This week, we are releasing a special “flash episode” of Grand Tamasha to recap India’s recently concluded 2026 state assembly elections. As usual, we will still be publishing a new Grand Tamasha episode next Tuesday, May 12 at 9 pm ET, Wednesday 6:30 am IST.  It’s safe to say that India’s 2026 state assembly elections have scrambled many of the assumptions that have long sha...

India hasn’t updated how political power is distributed across its states in five decades—and the consequences are mounting. At the heart of delimitation lies a fundamental tension: should representation follow population, or preserve a delicate federal balance? Successive governments chose to defer the question, freezing India’s electoral map even as demographic divides deepened. The Modi governm...

For more than three decades, India’s growth story has rested on the promise of a large and youthful workforce—but whether that promise is being realized remains an open question. A new report published by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University— State of Working India 2026 —takes a comprehensive look at how young Indians move from education into the labor market—and asks wh...

Over the past several decades, the story of Silicon Valley has been deeply intertwined with the story of Indian immigrants—engineers, entrepreneurs, and investors who helped shape the technology revolution while building new bridges between the United States and India.  Few individuals embody that journey as vividly Kanwal Rekhi . Rekhi was the first Indian-American founder & CEO to take a venture...

For decades, India’s growth story has rested on the spectacular rise of its middle class. But a new book argues that this very group—roughly 40 million income-tax–paying households—is now under acute strain.  Facing a convergence of job disruption, wage stagnation, and rising debt, the middle class may no longer be the engine of growth it once was. This is the argument made in a new book titled, B...

On this week’s show, Milan sits down with the novelist Karan Mahajan, author of a much-anticipated new novel, The Complex. Karan and Milan discussed the book at our first ever live Grand Tamasha event at Carnegie headquarters in Washington, DC on March 16. Karan is an associate professor in Literary Arts at Brown University and the author of the books Family Planning and The Association of Small B...

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has once again altered the contours of international politics. For India, this evolving context raises several important questions about the viability of its foreign policy approach. This week on the podcast, Milan sits down with three of the contributors to a new compilation published by the Carnegie Endowment—Shoumitro Chatterjee, Sameer Lalwani, and Tanv...

Over the past two decades, Washington and New Delhi have drawn steadily closer—driven by shared concerns about China, expanding economic ties, and a growing Indian diaspora in the United States. To help us unpack all of this, this week Milan spoke with Congressman Ami Bera in his office on Capitol Hill.