Grand Tamasha

This week, Grand Tamasha is launching a new four-part series on energy and climate issues in collaboration with CASI—the Center for the Advanced Study of India—at the University of Pennsylvania.

Over the next several months, we will be putting a spotlight on some of the most pressing energy and climate issues facing India—from India’s green transition to the effect of climate on its coastlines, and India’s multilateral climate diplomacy. And we will be doing so by leveraging the expertise of many CASI experts and affiliates.

The first part of this new series looks at the connection between pollution and politics. Air pollution is often treated as an environmental or public health problem. But it is also a deeply political one—shaped by what voters demand, what politicians believe they will get credit for, which sources of pollution governments choose to target, and which institutions are capable of compelling action. 

To discuss why toxic air has proven so politically challenging in India—and what it might take to change that—Milan is joined on the show this week by Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar and Tariq Thachil.

Vaishnavi is an award-winning science and environment journalist based in Mumbai, and a former Visiting Fellow at CASI. She is a Contributing Correspondent for Science and an editorial consultant with The Times of India. She has previously worked as a staff editor at the Christian Science Monitor and editor of the magazine Time Out Mumbai.

Tariq is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2020-2025, he served as the Director of the Center for Advanced Study of India (CASI). Tariq has worked on political parties and political behavior, identity politics, urbanization and migration, but he is also developing a new research agenda on the political consequences of air pollution. 

The trio discuss why India and South Asia sit at the epicenter of the global air pollution crisis, why toxic air produces such little political pressure, and what politicians actually know about India’s dirty air. Plus, they discuss the role of civil society, the courts, and ordinary citizens in holding politicians accountable on climate issues.

Episode notes:

1.     Shikhar Singh and Tariq Thachil, “Why Is Air Pollution Not a Political Issue?  Evidence from India,” Working Paper, March 13, 2026.

2.     Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, “Climate Change is Stretching Mumbai to its Limits,” The Atlantic, February 7, 2022.

3.     Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, “Optics, Ambition, and a Genuine Transition: Reflections from the Inaugural Mumbai Climate Week,” CASI India in Transition, August 4, 2026.

4.     Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar, “Mumbai's air quality: ‘Time to look at city’s airshed & not just localised pollution,’”Times of India, October 30, 2023.

Few subjects are as central to the functioning of government—or as likely to make the average citizen’s eyes glaze over—as how governments collect and spend the public’s money. But public finance shapes nearly every interaction Indian citizens have with the state. 

How much tax revenue will my state receive from the Centre? Will my local government have the resources to invest in the urban amenities I value? And how can I distinguish between an expensive freebie and a purposeful, targeted cash transfer?

A new book, Fiscal Fables: A Citizen’s Guide to Public Finance, demystifies India’s public finances for a lay audience—and explains public finance concepts using relatable stories and examples. 

The book is co-written by two public policy researchers, Sarthak Pradhan and Pranay Kotasthane. They join Milan on the podcast this week to discuss their joint work.

Sarthak is a fellow at the Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy. He also serves as assistant editor of the Indian Public Policy Review. 

Pranay is deputy director at Takshashila, where he chairs the High-Tech Geopolitics Programme. He also co-writes Anticipating the Unintended, a weekly newsletter on public policy, and co-hosts Puliyabaazi, a Hindi–Urdu podcast on politics, policy and technology.

Sarthak, Pranay, and Milan discuss why every active citizen should care about public finance, the competing visions in India of the purpose of government, and the vagaries of the Indian tax system. They also talk about the much-maligned Goods and Services Tax, the tensions in India’s fiscal federalism, and the rise of ‘competitive populism.

Episode notes:

1.        “India's Tryst With Policymaking” (with Pranay Kotasthane), Grand Tamasha, January 25, 2023.

2.        “India and the Emerging Chip Race” (with Pranay Kotasthane), Grand Tamasha, January 30, 2024.

3.        Khyati Pathak, Anupam Manur, and Pranay Kotasthane, We, The Citizens: Strengthening the Indian Republic (New Delhi: Penguin, 2024).

Nearly eight decades after the partition of British India, Indians and Pakistanis still view one another with deep suspicion—and their perceptions of the wider world are increasingly divergent as well. 

New data collected by the Pew Research Center offer a revealing snapshot of how people across South Asia view their neighbors, major powers like the United States and China, and India’s growing global role. To unpack what these findings tell us about global public opinion, Milan is joined on the podcast this week by Jacob Poushter. 

Jacob is the lead author of recent Pew report titled, “India and Pakistan: Rivals with Divergent Views of the Global Order.”

He is an associate director at Pew Research Center and an expert in international survey research. He writes about international public opinion on a variety of topics—including the international image of the United States and perceptions of global threats. He is also responsible for designing survey questionnaires, managing survey projects, analyzing data and developing topics for the annual Global Attitudes Survey.

Milan and Jacob discuss the work of the Pew Research Center, the hardened views of India and Pakistan towards one another, and the two neighbors’ views of the great powers. Plus, the two discuss how India is viewed by other countries in the neighborhood and the places where India’s standing has experienced a significant decline.

Episode notes:

1.        Jacob Poushter, Sneha Gubbala, and William Miner, “How do South Asians view other countries in the region?” Pew Research Center, August 13, 2026.

2.        Sneha Gubbala, “Public opinion of India is mixed across 36 countries,” Pew Research Center, August 13, 2026.

3.        “Neha Sahgal on Religion and Identity in Contemporary India,” Grand Tamasha, June 30, 2021.

This week, Grand Tamasha commemorates the release of our 300th episode. We started this show as an experiment in the run-up to India’s 2019 general elections. Seven years and 300 episodes later, we’re still around, and no one is more surprised than we are.

While India has changed in many ways over the past seven years, one constant has been our occasional Grand Tamasha roundtables with Sadanand Dhume of the Wall Street Journal and the Council on Foreign Relations and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution. It seemed only natural to celebrate our 300th episode by having them both on to discuss the latest in Indian politics and foreign policy. 

This week on the show, Milan, Sadanand, and Tanvi discuss the political fall-out of this summer’s Gen Z protests, the political future of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), and the churn within the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Plus, the trio discuss Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the potential thaw in China-India relations, and whether ties between India and the United States can weather the current turbulence.

Episode notes:

1.        Sadanand Dhume, “An India-China Rapprochement Isn’t in the Cards,” Wall Street Journal, September 9, 2026.

2.        Sadanand Dhume, “India’s Global Image Problem,” Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2026. 

3.        Sadanand Dhume, “‘Cockroaches’ Threaten to Overrun Narendra Modi’s Kitchen,” Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2026. 

4.        Tanvi Madan, “India’s Strategy for Economic Security: Deny, Indigenize, and Diversify,” Asia Policy 21, no. 3 (2026). 

The history of India’s independence is often told through a familiar set of stories: the end of the British Raj, the trauma of Partition, Nehru’s “tryst with destiny” speech, and the birth of two new nations at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947.

But the India that emerged eight decades ago was far from a finished product. 

In the final weeks before independence, the subcontinent remained a patchwork of British provinces and more than 500 princely states, many of whose rulers were weighing whether to join India, accede to Pakistan, or become independent. 

Behind the public celebrations was a frantic struggle over what India would actually look like—and whether a unified Indian state would come into being at all.

A decade ago, investigative journalist Josy Joseph stumbled upon hundreds of thousands of pages of uncatalogued archives gathering dust. Those documents eventually helped inspire his new book, The Birth of a Nation: Twenty-One Days That Changed India, which reconstructs the dramatic three weeks leading up to August 15, 1947.

Josy joins Milan on the podcast this week to talk about his best-selling new book. Josy is one of India’s best-known journalists and founder of Confluence Media, an investigative journalism outfit. He is author of two acclaimed books, A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India and The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State. 

Josy previously served as the national security editor at The Hindu, special projects editor at The Times of India, and held key roles in many other leading publications. 

Josy and Milan discuss the serendipitous encounter in the archives that led to the book’s creation, the heroic behind-the-scenes efforts of V.P. Menon’s States Department, the machinations of India’s princely rulers, and the chaos and uncertainty that followed Indian independence.  

Episode notes:

1.        “India’s Hidden Treatise on Statecraft” (with Rahul Sagar), Grand Tamasha, November 2, 2022.

2.        “The Forgotten Origins of Indian Liberalism” (with Rahul Sagar), Grand Tamasha, July 1, 2026.

3.        “The Downfall of India's Princely State” (with John Zubrzycki), Grand Tamasha, November 22, 2023.

4.        “The Forgotten Partitions That Remade South Asia” (with Sam Dalrymple), Grand Tamasha, October 29, 2025.

Over the summer, thousands of young Indians took to the streets to demand sweeping reforms of the higher education sector. This unexpected wave of Gen Z mobilization was catalyzed by the emergence of the Cockroach Janata Party, a satirical meme that blossomed into a national movement. Protests that began over the state of higher education soon tapped into something much larger: growing frustration among young Indians over jobs, economic opportunity, and their prospects for the future.

India’s jobs debate is often framed around a familiar set of concerns: too many people working in agriculture, too few manufacturing jobs, an economy that is too-services oriented, and stubbornly high unemployment among the young. Our guest on the show this week has views on these subjects that often cut against the conventional wisdom. 

Vidya Mahambare is the Union Bank Chair Professor of Economics and Director at the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai. She studies central banking and monetary policy, structural transformation, labor market dynamics and gender economics. She is also a prolific commentator and writes regularly for outlets like Mint, Business Standard, and The Print.

She joins Milan on the Season 16 premiere of Grand Tamasha to discuss the economic drivers of the Gen Z protests, the link between unemployment and education, and the futility of the manufacturing versus services debate. Plus, the two discuss the exodus of young people from the agricultural sector, the misleading headlines on female labor force participation, and India’s acute urban housing shortage.

Episode notes:

Most conventional accounts of the origins of liberalism in India typically begin and end with the British. Indian thinkers are often depicted as encountering liberal ideas through colonial institutions, adapting them to local conditions, and eventually turning them against the British Raj. 

But a new book by Rahul Sagar, The Birth of Indian Liberalism: Mama Parmanand’s Letters to an Indian Raja, uncovers an older tradition of Indian liberal thought through a remarkable work first published in 1891 and then largely forgotten for more than a century.

In a series of incisive letters addressed to the native ruler of Baroda, Parmanand argued that India’s native princes should embrace constitutional government, cultivate liberal values, and liberate their subjects from oppressive customs, social hierarchies, and arbitrary state power. 

To talk more about Parmanand’s life, the rediscovery of his letters, and what they tell us about the origins of Indian liberalism, Rahul Sagar joins Milan on the show this week for the season finale of Grand Tamasha.

Rahul is Global Network Associate Professor of Political Science at New York University Abu Dhabi and a leading scholar of modern Indian political thought. He previously taught at Princeton University and Yale-NUS College. He is the author or editor of several books, including To Raise a Fallen People and The Progressive Maharaja.

Episode notes:

1.        “India’s Hidden Treatise on Statecraft (with Rahul Sagar),” Grand Tamasha, November 1, 2022. 

2.        “What Kind of World Power Does India Want to Be (with Rahul Sagar),” Grand Tamasha, June 1, 2022.

3.        Rahul Sagar, Ideas of India, database.

The making of India’s Constitution is usually told as the story of the few hundred prominent lawyers, politicians, and intellectuals who comprised the Constituent Assembly—the body tasked with drafting this historic document between 1946 and 1949.

But a new book by the scholars Rohit De and Ornit Shani, Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History, argues this familiar account captures only part of the story.

Drawing on a remarkable range of archival material, the book shows that constitution-making was not confined to the halls of the Constituent Assembly alone. It also played out in provincial legislatures, princely states, government offices, civic associations, and communities across India. Ordinary citizens debated the constitution, petitioned its authors, organized around it, and creatively sought to shape its provisions.

To discuss the book and its relevance for our understanding of India’s democratic evolution, Rohit and Ornit join Milan on the show this week. Rohit is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic. Ornit is an associate professor of Asian Studies at Haifa University. She is the author of How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the Universal Franchise.

The trio discuss the serendipitous origins of the book, the authors’ unusual writing process, and the gaps in the conventional account of India’s constitution-making. Plus, the three talk about overlooked constitution-making efforts in the princely states and the forgotten story of Manipur’s democratic experiment.

Episode notes:

For decades, the H-1B visa program has been the centerpiece of America’s high-skilled immigration system. 

To its defenders, it is a vital pipeline that brings talented workers from around the world to power the U.S. economy. But, to its critics, it is a system rife with abuse—one that can undermine American workers while also trapping foreign workers in exploitative arrangements.

A new book, Wild Wild East: Exiled Americans, Enslaved Indians and the Systemic Abuse of the H-1B Visa Programme, takes readers inside one especially shadowy corner of this world: the universe of so-called “desi consultancies.” These companies—also known as H-1B “body shops”— connect Indian tech workers to American employers through a maze of recruiters, subcontractors, universities, and corporate clients.

The book follows the lives of Indian H-1B seekers, displaced American tech workers, and the firms that profit from a deeply broken system. It is at a story about immigration, labor exploitation, globalization, and the darker side of the U.S.-India tech corridor.

To talk more about the book, Milan is joined on the show this week by its author, Tanul Thakur. Tanul is an award-winning journalist and film critic. In 2015, he won the National Film Award for Best Film Critic—the youngest critic to receive the honor. Wild Wild East is his first book.

Milan and Tanul discuss the latter’s firsthand experience with a “desi consultancy,” the exploitation many H-1B workers endure, and the role U.S. higher education plays in this ecosystem. Plus, the two discuss how Andhra Pradesh and Telangana became the epicenter of H-1B-related fraud and the ways in which the H-1B program can be reformed. 

Episode notes:

1.        Aditya Mani Jha, “The human cost of H1-B dream: Review of Tanul Thakur’s Wild Wild East,” Hindu, June 11, 2026.

2.        Tanul Thakur, “‘Heads they won, tails he lost’: How ‘desi consultancies’ prey on Indian grads in America,” NewsLaundry, May 24, 2026. 

3.        Anant Gupta, “Indians slam MAGA ‘war’ over H-1B skilled-worker visas as ‘racist,’” Washington Post, January 7, 2025.

The audio of this podcast was optimized using Adobe Podcast Enhancer AI. No alterations were made to the substance of the conversation.

In democracies, we typically assume that public opinion on issues like jobs, the economy, and inflation matter for shaping policy and politics. But opinions on foreign policy are often treated as the preserve of elites, especially in a country like India.

Yet, it turns out that we know surprisingly little about what ordinary Indians think about foreign policy, how stable those views are, and whether they influence the choices that governments make.

A new short book, Indian Public Opinion toward the Major Powers, tackles these questions by examining more than six decades of Indian attitudes toward the United States, China, and Russia. The book draws on a wide range of survey data to ask how Indians view the major powers, how those views have shifted over time, and what they reveal about democracy, accountability, and foreign policy in India.

To discuss the book, co-authors Aidan Milliff and Paul Staniland join Milan on the podcast this week. Aidan is an assistant professor of political science at Florida State University. Many moons ago, he was a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow with the Carnegie South Asia Program. Paul is professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The trio discuss the treasure trove of data on Indian public opinion the authors stumbled upon, the characteristics of India’s “foreign policy public,” and the variation in Indian attitudes toward the United States, China, and Russia/the Soviet Union. Plus, the discuss why a respondent’s region emerges as a strong predictor of one’s foreign policy views.

Episode notes: