Over the past decade, India has witnessed significant conflict within—and around—several democratic institutions meant to act as a check on executive power. One of the most important theatres of conflict has been the judiciary—more specifically, the Supreme Court. A new book by the legal scholar Gautam Bhatia , Unsealed Covers: A Decade of the Constitution, the Courts and the State , takes readers through some of the most controversial cases that have come before the court during this critical d...
Dec 13, 2023•44 min•Season 10Ep. 15
On December 3, votes were finally tallied in four Indian states which went for elections this past month—the last test parties and candidates will face before the general elections in April-May of next year. After much anticipation, Counting Day left very little to the imagination. In a big setback for the Congress Party and the opposition alliance more broadly, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won decisive elections in three big Hindi belt states—Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. The...
Dec 06, 2023•50 min•Season 10Ep. 14
Anyone who has even casually glanced at the news over the past several weeks would be hard pressed to miss the plethora of headlines about north India’s air pollution crisis. Every year as late Fall rolls around, air pollution across north India—including in the nation’s capital of Delhi—climbs to levels that make life almost unlivable for hundreds of millions of residents. As bad as the crisis is, the situation is not helpless. Milan’s guest on the show this week, the economist Anant Sudarshan,...
Nov 29, 2023•42 min•Season 10Ep. 13
One of the most remarkable episodes in modern Indian history is the story of how the leaders of over 550 sovereign princely states were convinced that they should give up their independence to become a part of a free India. This monumental task of accession was carried out over weeks, not months or years. But accession was just the first step in an ongoing drama between India’s princes and the rulers of the Indian republic, a drama that would unfold over the next many decades. A new book, Dethro...
Nov 22, 2023•56 min•Season 10Ep. 12
In recent years, there has a growing concern that the Supreme Court of India is not firing on all cylinders. Critics have argued that the court functions in an opaque manner, exhibits excessive deference to the executive, is sluggish in concluding cases, and is hampered by an excessive reliance on super-lawyers who can get their cases heard for exorbitant fees. A new book, Court on Trial: A Data-Driven Account of the Supreme Court of India , examines each of these critiques, using hard data from...
Nov 15, 2023•51 min•Season 10Ep. 11
It’s been six weeks since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to the floor of Parliament to announce that Canadian security agencies had evidence of credible allegations that Indian authorities had a hand in the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, on Canadian soil in June 2023. Nijjar was a well-known activist in Sikh diaspora circles but someone Indian authorities branded a terrorist. Trudeau’s allegations led to a rapid downward spiral in bilateral relations between In...
Nov 08, 2023•51 min•Season 10Ep. 10
As the fighting between Israel and Hamas intensifies, the world is bracing for the widening of a conflict that has the potential to escalate quickly and bring in outside powers from the region and beyond. India’s position in the aftermath of the horrific Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th—and the subsequent Israeli military response—has been noteworthy. Unlike many countries in the Global South, which offered qualified support for Israel after the attacks and have positioned themselves with ...
Nov 01, 2023•54 min•Season 10Ep. 9
In September, India’s parliament passed a long-anticipated piece of legislation, known as the Women’s Reservation Bill . The bill—which sailed through both houses of Parliament within days of being introduced— reserves one-third of seats in the national parliament and the various state assemblies for women—formalizing a quota that has long existed at the local levels in India, but never at higher levels of politics. To discuss the bill—what it says, why it was passed, and what it might mean for ...
Oct 25, 2023•41 min•Season 10Ep. 8
One of the major themes of India’s G20 presidency, which concludes later this year, has been the advancement of an ambitious green transition for the 21st century. If the world’s hopes of accelerating a clean, sustainable, just, affordable, and inclusive energy transition are to come to fruition, ensuring the spread of solar power—especially to the poorest parts of the globe—will be essential. Milan’s guest on the show this week is tasked with doing exactly this. Dr. Ajay Mathur is the Director ...
Oct 18, 2023•36 min•Season 10Ep. 7
Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India is a new book on the Swatantra Party, a leading opposition party that emerged after Indian independence to contest the entrenched dominance of the Congress Party. The leaders of Swatantra imagined a conservative alternative to the left-of-center Congress, one that embraced libertarian principles and promoted the idea of a “free economy.” This new book, written by the historian Aditya Balasubramanian , holds many lessons...
Oct 11, 2023•45 min•Season 10Ep. 6
Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century is a sweeping new book by the historian Joya Chatterji . The book tells the subcontinent's story from the British Raj through independence and partition to the forging of the modern nations of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. This is no ordinary history, however. Of course, there is plenty of politics and an in-depth discussion of citizenship, nationalism, and political leaders past and present. But there is equal attention paid to unconventiona...
Oct 04, 2023•49 min•Season 10Ep. 5
This August, India’s parliament passed a landmark piece of legislation, known as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act. The new act provides a framework for the protection of users’ personal data and the privacy of individuals. The passage of this bill marks the culmination of a decade-long effort to frame a data privacy law—an effort that has had many twists and turns. To talk more about this important piece of legislation and what it means for India and Indians, Milan is joined on the show ...
Sep 27, 2023•47 min•Season 10Ep. 4
On Saturday, September 9, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi surprised observers by announcing on Day One of the G20 summit in New Delhi that all 20 member nations had achieved consensus on the New Delhi G20 Summit Leaders Declaration. The announcement capped nine months of frenzied activity which involved thousands of meetings, consultations, and side events associated with India’s G20 leadership. It also came just days after some negotiators warned that a consensus may be out of reach—due to ...
Sep 20, 2023•45 min•Season 10Ep. 3
Ro Khanna is a Member of the United States Congress who has represented California's 17th congressional district since 2017. He also serves as co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, and recently led a bipartisan delegation to India that coincided with India’s Independence Day. During their visit, the eight-member delegation met with business, tech, and government leaders in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and New Delhi. To talk more about his visit—and his views on U.S.-India rel...
Sep 13, 2023•31 min•Season 10Ep. 2
After a long summer break, we are excited to be back with the tenth season of Grand Tamasha. To kick off our brand-new season, this week Milan sits down with the U.S. government’s point person on the U.S.-India defense relationship to discuss the next chapter in U.S.-India defense ties. Lindsey Ford is the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia. In this capacity, she serves as the principal advisor to senior leadership at the Pentagon for all policy matters pertaining...
Sep 06, 2023•39 min•Season 10Ep. 1
Programming Note: This is the very last episode of Season Nine of Grand Tamasha. As is our usual, we are going to take July and August off to recharge our batteries. We will be back in September with our tenth season of podcasts, and we’re excited about the conversations we have planned for the Fall. Some of our listeners may recall way back in February 2020—the month before the world came to a standstill—Milan sat down with the journalist Pramit Bhattacharya to discuss the unfolding crisis in I...
Jul 06, 2023•39 min•Season 9Ep. 24
Last week on the show, Milan sat down with the Carnegie Endowment’s Ashley J. Tellis to discuss his much talked about Foreign Affairs essay titled, “ America’s Bad Bet on India .” In that piece, Ashley argues that if U.S. policymakers are expecting India to come to America’s aid in the event of a military conflict with China, they would be well advised to keep their expectations in check. Ashley argues that such a military coalition is highly unlikely in the foreseeable future. A month after Ash...
Jun 28, 2023•35 min•Season 9Ep. 23
In a few days, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will arrive in Washington, D.C. to begin a historic state visit that is expected to further cement ties between the United States and India. Over the past two decades, this relationship has gone from awkward resentment during the Cold War to full-throated embrace after the year 2000. But a new essay by Ashley J. Tellis in Foreign Affairs titled, “ America’s Bad Bet on India ,” warns that there are limits to U.S.-India cooperation and Washington ...
Jun 21, 2023•49 min•Season 9Ep. 22
Later this summer, California could be first American state to ban discrimination on the basis of caste. California’s move, and the moves by universities, cities, and towns across the country, to raise issues of caste discrimination has generated a massive controversy that is roiling the Indian American community in the United States. One reporter, the freelance journalist Sonia Paul , has been doggedly pursuing this story for years, even before it became a mainstream news issue. Sonia is an awa...
Jun 14, 2023•40 min•Season 9Ep. 21
Leaders come and go, but institutions stay forever. This is the central takeaway of a new book by Subhashish Bhadra , Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back . Subhashish is an economist whose career has straddled both the policy and corporate worlds. He has worked at a leading global management consulting firm, a venture capital firm, and a tech start-up, working closely with CEOs, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, politicians and academics throughout his career. His new book is ...
Jun 07, 2023•43 min•Season 9Ep. 20
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 have the last laugh, extracting whatever they can from citizens who have few exit options. A new book b...
May 31, 2023•50 min•Season 9Ep. 19
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 Project and Refugees International — A Shadow of Refuge: Rohingya Refugees in India —sheds light on the ...
May 24, 2023•38 min•Season 9Ep. 18
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 Party (BJP) put in a disappointing performance, one that is likely to prompt some soul-searching as th...
May 17, 2023•46 min•Season 9Ep. 17
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 has India contained violence and preserved order? How have the approaches and capacity of the State ...
May 10, 2023•58 min•Season 9Ep. 16
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 China as the world’s most populous country and what this means for the country’s future prospects. Seco...
May 03, 2023•45 min•Season 9Ep. 15
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 International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, revisits this consensus and fi...
Apr 26, 2023•46 min•Season 9Ep. 14
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 mold and, in so doing, helped to define what a generation of students, scholars, and readers understa...
Apr 19, 2023•52 min•Season 9Ep. 13
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 75 years. Challenging the conventional wisdom, Mody argues that India’s post-independence leaders—fr...
Apr 12, 2023•46 min•Season 9Ep. 12
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 plummeting while Adani’s own net worth took a massive nosedive. Today, the group is trying to calm in...
Apr 05, 2023•44 min•Season 9Ep. 11
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 India, forces us to revise this conventional wisdom. In some parts of India, the state has succeeded in de...
Mar 29, 2023•41 min•Season 9Ep. 10
