Indian federalism is encountering some of its biggest challenges since the early years of the republic. Relations between the union government in Delhi and the states are rocky, to put it mildly. India’s better-off states are growing increasingly agitated about a system of fiscal federalism in which richer states end up subsidizing poorer, more backward ones. The new Goods and Services Tax (GST) has attracted fresh criticism because its benefits have not been shared equally by all states. And th...
Oct 16, 2024•58 min•Season 12Ep. 6
There is hardly a day that goes by when the subject of India’s demographics is not front and center in the news. Whether it is India surpassing China as the world’s most populous country, questions about how the Indian economy can provide enough jobs for a growing workforce, or how population should be used to allocate everything from legislative seats to fiscal transfers, demographics are at the heart of many debates surrounding India’s political economy. To talk about India’s demographics and ...
Oct 09, 2024•48 min•Season 12Ep. 5
On this week’s show, we’re doing something a little different. This week, India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar paid a visit to our Carnegie Endowment office in Washington to take part in a fireside chat with Carnegie’s President Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar . Dr. Jaishankar’s visit to Washington comes on the heels of last week’s Quad Summit and a spate of high-level meetings coinciding with the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This week, in place of our usual programm...
Oct 02, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 12Ep. 4
The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy is a new book by the journalist Rahul Bhatia . Many Grand Tamasha listeners will recognize Rahul’s byline in revered publications like the New Yorker, the Guardian, and Caravan. He’s written celebrated profiles of everyone from Arnab Goswami to cricket chief N. Srinivasan. And his reporting has taken on subjects from Baba Ramdev’s business empire to the COVID-19 pandemic. His new book is based on six years of research and reportage from across In...
Sep 25, 2024•57 min•Season 12Ep. 3
It has been more than three months since the conclusion of India’s massive 2024 general elections. And it is no exaggeration to say that the results of the election caught many, if not most, election observers by surprise. To many, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) appeared invincible in national elections especially given the widespread popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. And yet, the party suffered a significant setback, emerging as the single largest party but well short of a pa...
Sep 18, 2024•44 min•Season 12Ep. 2
After a short summer break, Grand Tamasha is back with its twelfth season! As we head into the U.S. presidential elections and bid farewell to the Biden administration, it seems like an opportune time to discuss the last four years of U.S.-India ties under President Biden and to take stock of where we are at this particular moment in history. To do so, Milan is joined by one of the show’s most popular guests, Ashley J. Tellis . Ashley holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie En...
Sep 11, 2024•46 min•Season 12Ep. 1
Gurcharan Das is one of India's best-known authors and thinkers. He had a celebrated career in business, most notably as the CEO of Procter and Gamble in India, before devoting his full attention to writing. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including India Unbound , The Difficulty of Being Good , and India Grows at Night . Most recently, Das has written a new book called The Dilemma of the Indian Liberal , in which he recounts his own professional and intellectual journey and tra...
Jun 26, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Season 11Ep. 23
This week on Grand Tamasha, Milan is joined by Grand Tamasha’s India news roundup regulars: Sadanand Dhume of the Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution. On the show this week, the trio discusses the 2024 Indian general election and its aftermath. They debate the politics, as well as the economic and foreign policy implications of the result. Did Rahul Gandhi rehabilitate himself? Will coalition politics derail economic reforms? How...
Jun 19, 2024•55 min•Season 11Ep. 22
On Sunday night, India’s new National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was sworn into office, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at its helm once more. We have a new group of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) allies, a new group of ministers, and a new look in terms of how the Modi government will function in its third term. However, the economic challenges the new government faces are quite old. Many experts believe that concerns about inflation, jobs, and lack of upward mobility dented the BJP’s...
Jun 12, 2024•40 min•Season 11Ep. 21
We’ve finally come to the end of the 46-day Indian general election. And we have a surprising result which many experts did not see coming. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi failed to secure a single-party majority in the Lok Sabha in what is being interpreted as a major setback. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) did, however, win a majority and is set to form a new government on June 8th under Modi’s leadership. The opposition Indian National Developm...
Jun 06, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Season 11Ep. 20
Gujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India is a new book by the scholar Christophe Jaffrelot but one that has an old backstory. It is the definitive account of Narendra Modi’s tenure as chief minister of the state of Gujarat. And it helps place into context the changes we’ve seen in national politics, economic policy, and society over the past ten years under Prime Minister Modi. It is a book that the author started researching twenty years ago and is finally out in the world. To talk more ...
May 29, 2024•57 min•Season 11Ep. 19
Over the last five years, Milan has interviewed authors of big books, that have brought innovative new ideas to the India policy debate. And he’s also interviewed authors of lengthy books. On the show this week, he sits down with an author who’s written a big book in every sense of the term. It is no stretch to say that Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance is one of the most important books written about the political economy of India’s development. Over...
May 22, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 11Ep. 18
Breaking the Mould: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity is a big new book by the economists Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba . The book is both a critique of India’s development model as well as a manifesto for reform. Most notably, it challenges the conventional wisdom that India’s primary goal should be to transform the country into a blue-collar manufacturing powerhouse. Rajan and Lamba argue that India cannot duplicate China’s development model, but it has the opportunity to leapfrog by focu...
May 15, 2024•51 min•Season 11Ep. 17
The third phase of India’s 44-day long polls took place this week with voting held in 94 constituencies across 12 states. Thus far, the elections have been marked by lower-than-expected turnout, intensifying communal rhetoric, and a sharp debate about inequality and redistribution. Against this backdrop, the New York Times Magazine recently published an essay by the journalist Samanth Subramanian titled, “ Time Is Running Out for Rahul Gandhi’s Vision for India .” The essay was based on a report...
May 08, 2024•48 min•Season 11Ep. 16
The incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi entered this election as the clear favorite with every single pre-election survey pointing a decisive victory. However, the party is leaving no stone unturned in its effort to notch a third consecutive parliamentary majority. To discuss the BJP’s campaign, Milan is joined on the show this week by Smriti Kak Ramachandran , a veteran journalist who covers the BJP for the Hindustan Times . Smriti has spent over a decade in j...
May 01, 2024•45 min•Season 11Ep. 15
As India heads to the polls, a new chapter is being written in a very old debate about poverty and inequality in India. This debate has been stirred up by the release of new data from a government-sponsored consumption survey, which some have argued shows a massive decline in poverty in India. Others believe that this data are not so unequivocal and point to a widening gap between top income-earners and ordinary Indians. To make sense of this debate, Milan is joined on the show this week by Mait...
Apr 24, 2024•56 min•Season 11Ep. 14
In just a few days, India’s eighteenth general elections will get underway with voting in the first phase kicking off on April 19. Between April 19 and June 1, India will have seven separate polling days culminating in a final counting of votes on June 4. Every single pre-election survey to date shows the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi winning a comfortable majority of seats in the Lok Sabha. If these predictions come to fruition, it would be the fir...
Apr 17, 2024•50 min•Season 11Ep. 13
On March 11, the Indian Defense Research and Development Organization conducted the maiden test of its Agni-V MIRV (Multiple Independently Targetable Re-Entry Vehicle) missile. MIRV capability is a complex technology and there are only a handful of countries that have developed it. The test represents a breakthrough for India’s missile program but it’s also prompted warnings of a new arms race in the Indo-Pacific, a region already marked by sharpening geopolitical rivalries. To discuss India’s m...
Apr 10, 2024•53 min•Season 11Ep. 12
It seems wherever you turn these days, there are stories about India’s status as the fastest growing major economy in the world. Its growth rates remain the envy of both the developed—and the developing—world. But what is really happening under the hood? What are the opportunities for India in a world riven by conflict and technological disruptions? And what challenges might it face as it tries to navigate these choppy waters? To talk about the nuts and bolts of the Indian economy, Milan is join...
Apr 03, 2024•38 min•Season 11Ep. 11
In today’s India, there are few historical figures whose writing and thinking help explain the current ideological zeitgeist more than Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. Despite this newfound attention, Savarkar is often viewed in black and white—as a staunch Hindu nationalist who devoted his life to expounding the virtues of conservative, Hindu majority rule. A new book by the Berkeley historian Janaki Bakhle , Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva , paints a much more nuanced picture of the Hindutva ideo...
Mar 27, 2024•50 min•Season 11Ep. 10
A few weeks ago, the Indian government formally notified the rules implementing the controversial 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA. The law provides persecuted religious minorities hailing from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan an expedited pathway to Indian citizenship, provided they belong to the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Parsi, or Sikh communities. Notably, the law does not provide such a pathway to those who belong to the Muslim faith. The notification of the CAA rules—on t...
Mar 20, 2024•59 min•Season 11Ep. 9
Zac O’Yeah is a Swedish novelist, rock musician, and author of the Majestic Trilogy —a trio of detective stories set in his adopted home of Bengaluru. And if that were not enough, he’s also the author of the brand-new book, The Great Indian Food Trip: Around a Subcontinent à la Carte . In the book, O’Yeah catalogues his travels crisscrossing India on a gluttonous search for the best food and drink—from the pickled mussels of Kerala to the goat’s brain of Mumbai’s Irani cafes and the signature ma...
Mar 13, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Season 11Ep. 8
Over the last several decades, there have been monumental changes in the social, economic, and political lives of Dalits, who have historically been one of the most oppressed groups in all of South Asia. A new volume edited by three leading scholars of India— Dalits in the New Millennium —examines these changes, interrogates their impacts on Dalit lives, and traces the shift in Dalit politics from a focus on social justice—to a focus on development and socio-economic mobility. D. Shyam Babu , wh...
Mar 06, 2024•41 min•Season 11Ep. 7
Two weeks ago, a five-judge bench of India’s Supreme Court ruled that electoral bonds—a controversial instrument of political giving introduced by the Narendra Modi government—violated the Constitution and would immediately cease operating. Under the court’s ruling, the State Bank of India will immediately stop issuing bonds; the Election Commission of India must disclose details of all transactions since April 2019; and any bonds which have not yet been encashed are to be refunded. On this week...
Feb 28, 2024•48 min•Season 11Ep. 6
With general elections just months away, it is the era of the ten-year retrospective—a chance for India watchers to reflect on what has changed over the past decade under the Narendra Modi government—and what has not. One area especially deserving of scrutiny is India’s relations with the neighborhood. The Modi government came to power with an eye towards reimagining India’s relationships in South Asia, and across the Indo-Pacific. Yet, the past ten years have seen tremendous upheaval in the reg...
Feb 21, 2024•52 min•Season 11Ep. 5
Last Thursday, voters in Pakistan went to the polls in the country’s first general elections since the July 2018 election that brought former prime minister Imran Khan to power. In 2022, Khan was ousted in an unprecedented no confidence vote and now finds himself behind bars. In the months before the election, Khan’s political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), was repressed with party members jailed, harassed, and eventually forced to contest the 2024 elections as independents. Pakistan’s p...
Feb 14, 2024•41 min•Season 11Ep. 4
From the Obama “birther” movement in the United States to the fringe politicians who believe congestion pricing in London is part of an international “socialist plot,” it is no exaggeration to say that conspiracy theories have become part of the standard political playbook the world over. But when it comes to outlandish conspiracy theories, India stands out as a country where such tales are driving everyday political conversations in a major way. Buoyed by politicians, the media, and social medi...
Feb 07, 2024•42 min•Season 11Ep. 3
It seems like you cannot open a newspaper, listen to a foreign policy podcast, or open Twitter/X without somebody somewhere sounding off on the emerging geopolitical battle over semiconductors. Semiconductors, which we colloquially refer to as chips, have quickly moved from the periphery to center-stage of global high politics. To discuss this high-stakes race, and India’s role in it, Milan is joined on the show this week by the scholar Pranay Kotasthane . Pranay is Chair of High-Tech Geopolitic...
Jan 31, 2024•56 min•Season 11Ep. 2
This week, Grand Tamasha kicks off its eleventh season with a special return guest to the podcast. The Third Way: India’s Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance is an important new book by the lawyer-scholar-and-author Rahul Matthan . Rahul is a partner at the law firm Trilegal , where he heads their technology practice. Over the past several years, he has worked closely with the Government of India, most recently as DPI advisor to the Ministry of Finance during India’s G20 presidency. Rahul ...
Jan 24, 2024•51 min•Season 11Ep. 1
Back in 2019, we started the Grand Tamasha podcast on a whim. India’s 2019 general elections were around the corner, and we sensed that there might be a (temporary) marketplace for a weekly audio podcast focused on Indian politics and policy for diehards hoping to keep up with the campaign action. Nearly five years later, the podcast has become a weekly fixture and the marketplace has turned out to be more welcoming that we had imagined. For Milan, one of the joys of doing a podcast week-in and ...
Dec 20, 2023•23 min•Season 10Ep. 16
