Grand Tamasha

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 year’s climate summit. Rich nations are pushing...

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 its approach to great power politics. And now Rahul has an...

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 b...

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: Of, By, For Wo(men) , which dist...

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 Brookings Institution.  The trio discusses three topics. First, they e...

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 is the co-founder and director of EkStep , a nonprofit ed...

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 what most social scien...

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 debt burden.  Sri Lanka has experienced a full-blown crisis...

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 rich history of cooperation, contestation, conflict, and...

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 Delhi, is the author of a new book, How China Sees India and the World . Th...

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 season of Grand Tamasha, Milan is joined on the podcast by podcast regulars, Sadanand...

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 years later, th...

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 1947. A new book by political scientist Rahul Sagar , To Raise a Fallen Peo...

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 study co-authored by Devesh Kapur, Caroline Duckw...

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 the sudden r...

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 Macron. To discuss Modi’s Europe visit and it...

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 make sense of the latest developments...

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 featured a high-level virtual meeting between Indian Prim...

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 get it right and the top-down and the bottom...

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 for boycotting Muslim business...

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 from?  These are the questions that Bilal explores in his new bo...

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 New Delhi in the first high-level summit in two years. And, we’ve closed the books...

“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 new book, Watershed: How We Destroyed India’s Water and How We Can Save It , by the author Mri...

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 demise of a whole slew of politicians with househ...

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 of Ukraine, the spike in oil and other commodity prices, and per...