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 econ...
Mar 22, 2023•40 min•Season 9Ep. 9
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....
Mar 15, 2023•43 min•Season 9Ep. 8
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 se...
Mar 08, 2023•43 min•Season 9Ep. 7
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 Un...
Mar 01, 2023•40 min•Season 9Ep. 6
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 Ja...
Feb 22, 2023•49 min•Season 9Ep. 5
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 h...
Feb 15, 2023•43 min•Season 9Ep. 4
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 discuss this year’s budget and all that it means, Milan is joined on the show this week by Sukumar Ran...
Feb 08, 2023•38 min•Season 9Ep. 3
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 the future of the Congress Party? To talk about the yatra’s legacy, Milan is joined on the show this...
Feb 01, 2023•42 min•Season 9Ep. 2
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 book tries to tackle. Unlike most books in this genre, it is written for the proverbial man or woman ...
Jan 25, 2023•39 min•Season 9Ep. 1
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 highlighted on the show’s recently wrapped eighth season. Our Grand Tamasha top three books of 2022 (drumr...
Dec 21, 2022•12 min
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, they tell us about the political landscape heading into the 2024 general election. They also review ...
Dec 14, 2022•43 min•Season 8Ep. 15
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 fair share of intrigue. In what has traditionally been a two-party contest between the BJP and the Congr...
Dec 07, 2022•34 min•Season 8Ep. 14
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 year. To discuss India’s agenda at the G20 and its approach to multilateralism more generally, Milan i...
Nov 30, 2022•36 min•Season 8Ep. 13
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 have implications for freedom of expression, government regulation, and democratic accountability. ...
Nov 23, 2022•41 min•Season 8Ep. 12
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 , and it is a comprehensive study of conflict and cooperation as new powers join the global arena. The boo...
Nov 16, 2022•38 min•Season 8Ep. 11
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 for poor countries to announce greater cuts to carbon emissions, but developing countries claim that...
Nov 09, 2022•38 min•Season 8Ep. 10
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 another book out—this one is called, The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and S...
Nov 02, 2022•49 min•Season 8Ep. 9
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 by Ashley J. Tellis , the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for Internationa...
Oct 26, 2022•44 min•Season 8Ep. 8
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 distills some of the many lessons that she has learned over the years. The book is based on conversation...
Oct 19, 2022•39 min•Season 8Ep. 7
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 examine the latest drama coming out of the Indian National Congress and discuss the race to take over ...
Oct 12, 2022•48 min•Season 8Ep. 6
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 education platform. Her latest book, Samaaj, Sarkaar, Bazaar (Society, State, and Markets): A Citizen-...
Oct 05, 2022•37 min•Season 8Ep. 5
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 science texts simply cannot—it brings us into the private lives of young people in love in India. Mansi’s...
Sep 28, 2022•36 min•Season 8Ep. 4
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, resulting in Asia’s first default in decades and the collapse of the Rajapaksa government. While In...
Sep 21, 2022•35 min•Season 8Ep. 3
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 conciliation that defies easy explanations. This week on the show, Milan sits down with Chris Clary ...
Sep 14, 2022•42 min•Season 8Ep. 2
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 . This new volume is a companion to his highly acclaimed 2018 book, How India Sees the World . Milan spe...
Sep 07, 2022•38 min•Season 8Ep. 1
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 Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings...
Jun 15, 2022•40 min•Season 7Ep. 20
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, the Planning Commission may be gone, but it is not forgotten. A new book by the University of Notre Da...
Jun 08, 2022•42 min•Season 7Ep. 19
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 People: How Nineteenth Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours , invites readers to look even fu...
Jun 01, 2022•43 min•Season 7Ep. 18
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 Duckworth , and our very own Milan Vaishnav, sheds light on three elements of the Indo-Australian communi...
May 25, 2022•44 min•Season 7Ep. 17
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 resignation of Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa and continued calls for the resignation of Gotabaya Ra...
May 18, 2022•34 min•Season 7Ep. 16
