Grand Tamasha

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 hav...

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 Proj...

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 Pa...

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...

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 Chi...

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 Internati...

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 m...

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...

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 p...

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 Indi...

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, t...

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 partner...

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 th...

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 Ronoj...

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 For...

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...

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 important general election in 2024. To di...

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 the question remains—what does it actually mean for...

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 how can it evolve? These are just some of the questions that this important new...

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 his top three India reads of the year, based on some of the books we’ve highl...

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, and what, if anything,...

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 Janata Party (BJP) of Narendra Modi.  But this year’s contest is not without its fai...

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 key priorities heading into 2024, a general election ye...

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 further intrusion by the state. The debate is far from academic as its consequences...

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 in International Institutions , a...