Why do Indian voters elect candidates with criminal records? And what does it tell us about the health of the world's largest democracy?

In this episode of Backpocket Pod, I sit down with Milan Vaishnav, Senior Fellow and Director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and author of "When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics."

We move from political theory to the lived reality of governance in India, unpacking why the system works the way it does and who it actually serves.

We cover:

- Why criminal politicians continue to win elections

- The link between money, power, and electoral politics- Electoral bonds and political funding

- The strengths and weaknesses of India's democratic institutions- Parliament, accountability, and the Anti-Defection Law- State capacity and India's governance challenges

- National security institutions and bureaucratic constraints

- The changing nature of Indian democracy under the BJP

- What reforms could strengthen India's political system

Follow Backpocket Pod for more long-form conversations on geopolitics, history, and policy.

Yamini Aiyar is one of India's most respected scholars of governance, state capacity, and public policy. She was President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi from 2017 to 2024, and in 2008 founded its Accountability Initiative, known for pioneering one of India's largest expenditure tracking surveys for elementary education. She is currently Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) and Senior Visiting Fellow at Brown University. Her latest book, "Lessons in State Capacity from Delhi Schools" (Oxford University Press, 2024), draws on years of fieldwork inside government schools and frontline bureaucracies.

In the third episode of Backpocket Pod, Yamini Aiyar joins us for a wide-ranging conversation on the gap between the country the Constitution imagined and the state we actually live with. We begin with the founding bargain of liberty and equality, and how the relationship between citizen and state has shifted from one built on rights to one built on duties. We work through her argument that taxes come to feel like tribute when public services are broken, and what that breakdown does to accountability.

The conversation then turns to bureaucracy: what the Delhi schools experiment really revealed, why a teacher who walked in to teach ends up feeling like a clerk filling forms, and the post office paradox of a state that strips its own officials of autonomy. We close on why India can roll out Aadhaar to a billion people yet struggles to run a good school, along with decentralisation, technology and AI, and where the federalism project goes from here.

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Kanti Bajpai is one of India's most respected scholars of international relations and a leading authority on India-China relations. He served as the Wilmar Professor of Asian Studies at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore from 2011 to 2025, and is now Emeritus Professor there. He is currently Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) in New Delhi and Visiting Professor in the Department of International Relations at Ashoka University.

He has previously taught at Oxford and at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is the author of India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends and How Realist is India's National Security Policy, and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of China-India Relations and India, the West and International Order. Bajpai writes a monthly column for The Times of India, and comes from a distinguished family of Indian diplomats. His grandfather, Girija Shankar Bajpai, was independent India's first Secretary General in the Ministry of External Affairs under Nehru, and a central figure in shaping the foreign policy of the new republic.

In the second episode of Backpocket Pod, Kanti Bajpai joins us for a wide-ranging conversation on Indian foreign policy and the limits of strategic autonomy. We begin by asking what strategic autonomy actually means in practice, and work through how India has navigated its relationships with the four major centres of power: the United States, China, Russia, and the European Union. Bajpai walks us through where India has stood firm, where it has quietly bent, and why the term has remained deliberately undefined by successive governments.

The conversation then turns to China. Bajpai unpacks Beijing's three historic demands on India, namely the Dalai Lama and Tibet, the border settlement, and the expectation that India stay out of a US-led containment structure in Asia. He explains why the economic relationship has only deepened since Galwan, why a settlement on the boundary question may still be possible under Modi and Xi, and what India's negotiating style reveals about a much older tension between forensic legalism and strategic pragmatism. We discuss the puzzle of how a closed political system has produced such an innovative economy, and where India's education system, R&D investment, and state capacity continue to fall short.

We also explore Pakistan's diplomatic shrewdness and ask why a country India routinely dismisses continues to sit at tables we are excluded from. The episode closes with a personal turn. Bajpai reflects on the legacy of his grandfather G.S. Bajpai, the 1950 note that became the famous Sardar Patel letter to Nehru on China, and what it means to inherit a family tradition of thinking about India and the world.

Find Kanti Bajpai's India Versus China: Why They Are Not Friends and How Realist is India's National Security Policy on Amazon.

For more long-form conversations with scholars and thinkers, subscribe and stay tuned.

Ananya Vajpeyi is an intellectual historian and political theorist, and a Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi. Educated at Jawaharlal Nehru University, the University of Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar), and the University of Chicago (PhD), her work bridges political thought, philology, and public life.

She is the author of Righteous Republic, an award-winning study of India’s founding political thinkers, and her latest book, Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities.

In the inaugural episode of Backpocket Pod, Ananya Vajpeyi joins us to discuss her new book, Place — a collection of essays written over twenty-five years, set across thirteen cities from New York and Dresden to Banaras and Bangalore. We explore Place as a deeply personal yet political meditation on urban life. Ananya reflects on how memory, architecture, friendship, and time itself shape the “private mood maps” we carry within us. She speaks candidly about navigating cities as a woman, her experiments in blending fiction with academic writing, and how cities become landscapes for self-discovery.

The conversation also traces how questions of selfhood first raised in the Righteous Republic re-emerge through these urban encounters. We close with a powerful reading from her essay “Universal Beach,” on music as a force capable of unsettling caste boundaries and imagining cultural democracy.

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Website: https://rupalspod.substack.com/