Grand Tamasha

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 media forwards, they have come to be accepted as reality by many people.

A new book, Love Jihad and Other Fictions: Simple Facts to Counter Viral Falsehoods, takes aim at these conspiracy theories, subjecting them to strict journalistic scrutiny using ground reporting, data, and a bit of common sense. The authors—Sreenivasan Jain, Mariyam Alavi, and Supriya Sharma—are veteran journalists with a long track record of ground reporting.

On this week’s show, Mariyam and Supriya join Milan on the show to talk about the book. The trio discuss allegations of “love jihad,” rumors of widespread religious conversions, and claims of “minority appeasement.” Plus, the three discuss what lessons this book holds for journalism and civic discourse more generally.

Episode notes:

1. Karan Thapar, “Debunking propaganda myths, restoring truths,” Hindustan Times, January 27, 2024.

2. Sreenivasan Jain, Mariyam Alavi, and Supriya Sharma, “Bringing Journalistic Scrutiny to Hindutva Conspiracy Theories,” The Wire, January 17, 2024.

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 Geopolitics at the Takshashila Institution in Bangalore and, with Abhiram Manchi, is the author of the new book, When the Chips Are Down: A Deep Dive into a Global Crisis.

Pranay and Milan discuss the history of the technology, importance of semiconductors at the current geopolitical crossroads, and how the world will balance national security interests and with rapid technological change. Plus, the two discuss India’s most recent attempt to build a semiconductor ecosystem and the policy missteps that bedeviled past efforts.

Episode notes:

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

2. Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S. Jaitley, Missing In Action : Why You Should Care About Public Policy (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2023).

3. Pranay Kotasthane, “Anticipating the Unintended,” weekly Substack newsletter.

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 joins Milan on the show this week to discuss India’s unique approach to building digital public infrastructure (DPI)—an ecosystem that can have transformative impact at home but also build partnerships for India abroad. They talk about India’s DPI evolution, India’s unique public-private model, and whether India’s approach can be replicated abroad. Plus, the two discuss how India can mitigate the risks posed by excessive surveillance, privacy breaches, and beneficiary exclusion.

Episode notes:

1. “What the Personal Data Protection Act Means for India (with Rahul Matthan),” Grand Tamasha, Septemner 27, 2023.

2. “Book Discussion: The Third Way: India’s Revolutionary Approach to Data Governance,” Carnegie India Global Technology Summit 2023, December 7, 2023.

3. Rahul Matthan, “Tech policy in India has had a year packed with action,” Mint, December 27, 2023.

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 week-out is the ability to read some of the best new books on India and speak with their authors—from journalists to historians, and political scientists to novelists. Last year, we published our first annual list of our favorite books featured on the podcast in 2022. As the current year comes to an end and we prepare for a mini-podcast hibernation for the holidays, here—in no particular order—are our Grand Tamasha top books of 2023 (drumroll, please):

Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century

By Joya Chatterji. Published by Yale University Press, Penguin Random House India, Vintage.

Migrants and Machine Politics: How India's Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness

By Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil. Published by Princeton University Press.

Age of Vice

By Deepti Kapoor. Published by Riverhead, Juggernaut.

Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India

By Akshay Mangla. Published by Cambridge University Press.

In this episode, Milan talks about why he loved each of these books and includes short clips from his conversations with Joya, Adam and Tariq, Deepti, and Akshay. 

Think of this final episode of our tenth season as our little holiday present to you—our listeners.

Episode Notes:

Grand Tamasha’s Best Books of 2023

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 decade. Gautam is a lawyer who has been personally involved in several important contemporary constitutional cases. He is the author of multiple books of fiction and non-fiction and founder of the influential, “Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy” blog.

Gautam joins Milan on the show this week to talk about the relationship between judicial assertiveness and the strength of the government in power, disconcerting signs of excessive judicial deference, and ongoing debates over the right to privacy.

Plus, the two discuss the controversial issue of electoral bonds, the government’s proposed law outlining new procedures to select election commissioners, and the vagaries of the controversial anti-defection law.

1. Gautam Bhatia, “Decoding the Supreme Court’s Election Commission Judgment – I,” Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy (blog), March 3, 2023.

2. Gautam Bhatia, “A case that scans the working of the anti-defection law,” Hindu, February 24, 2023.

3. Gautam Bhatia, “The Supreme Court’s Right-to-Privacy Judgment,” Economic & Political Weekly 52, no. 44 (November 4, 2017).

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 lone Congress Party victory came in the southern state of Telangana, where it displaced the once-dominant regional party—the Bharat Rashriya Samithi (BRS).

To discuss the results—and what they tell us about the race for 2024—Milan is joined this week by two veteran political journalists: Sunetra Choudhury, the political editor of the Hindustan Times, and Dipankar Ghose serves, the paper’s deputy national editor.

The trio discuss the impressive performance of the BJP, the Congress Party’s lingering weaknesses, and how these results will shape the 2024 campaign. Plus, Milan, Sunetra, and Dipankar talk about the next steps for the opposition I.N.D.I.A. alliance and whether Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra had any long-term impact.

Episode notes:

Prashant Jha, “What BJP wins in 3 states mean for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections,” Hindustan Times, December 4, 2023.

Vaibhav Tiwari, “‘Conceit’: Congress slammed by INDIA bloc allies after 3-1 election drubbing,” Hindustan Times, December 4, 2023.

Ritesh Mishra and Dipankar Ghose, “Misfired OBC gambit, infighting: How to lose a mandate in 5 years,” Hindustan Times, December 4, 2023.

Sunetra Choudhury, “HT Interview: Unsavoury words were used against me…Madhya Pradesh election results have silenced them: Scindia,” Hindustan Times, December 4, 2023.

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, has spent years trying to evaluate solutions to what seems like an intractable problem. Anant is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Warwick and a Senior Fellow at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).

Milan and Anant discuss the contours of India’s air pollution crisis, the country’s environmental data challenge, and the efficacy of Delhi’s controversial “odd-even” scheme. Plus, the two discuss strategies for managing industrial pollution, the potential of Indian emissions markets, and whether voters sufficiently value the air they breathe.

Episode notes:

Michael Greenstone et al., “The Solvable Challenge of Air Pollution in India,” India Policy Forum 2017-18: 1-51.

Michael Greenstone et al., A Roadmap Towards Cleaning India’s Air (EPIC India and Harvard Kennedy School, 2018).

Michael Greenstone et al., “Can Pollution Markets Work in Developing Countries? Experimental Evidence from India,” Working Paper, January 27, 2023.

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, Dethroned: Patel, Menon and the Integration of Princely India, captures this incredible story in almost cinematic fashion. The book’s author is John Zubrzycki, an Australia-based writer who has previously worked in India as a diplomat as well as a foreign correspondent.

John joins Milan on the show this week to discuss life in princely India, the myth of India’s “bloodless revolution,” and the cast of characters tasked with integrating India. Plus, the two discuss the incredible story of the accession of Junagadh, Indira Gandhi’s decision to abolish privy purses, and the legacy of the princes seven-and-a-half decades on.

Episode notes:

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

“The Hidden History of Conservative Economics in Post-1947 India (with Aditya Balasubramanian,” Grand Tamasha, October 11, 2023.

“Ramachandra Guha Revisits India After Gandhi,” Grand Tamasha, April 19, 2023.

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 the Court’s own functioning. Milan’s guest on the show this week is one of the book’s authors, constitutional lawyer Aparna Chandra.

Aparna is an associate professor of law at the National Law School of India, and has previously worked at the National Judicial Academy in Bhopal and the National Law University in Delhi, where she founded the Centre for Constitutional Law, Policy and Governance.

Milan and Aparna talk about the institutional crisis facing the Court, the Court’s shocking backlog, and the arbitrary powers of the Chief Justice. Plus, the two discuss the controversy around judicial appointments, the excessive deference the Court pays to the government of the day, and what if anything can be done to improve the Court’s effectiveness. 

Episode notes:

“A Court in Crisis? Interview with the authors of 'Court on Trial', a data-driven analysis of the Supreme Court of India,” Bar&Bench, September 7, 2023.

[VIDEO] “How do we fix the Supreme Court of India?” Scroll Ideas, September 1, 2023.

Soutik Biswas, “Supreme Court: Why India's powerful top court is in a 'crisis,’” BBC News, July 31, 2023.

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 India and Canada, a spiral that shows no immediate sign of ending. To discuss these recent events—and the larger question of bilateral relations between Canada and India—Milan is joined on the show this week by Sanjay Ruparelia. Sanjay is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he holds the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair. He is the host of the podcast, “On the Frontlines of Democracy,” and the author of Divided We Govern: Coalition Politics in Modern India.

Milan and Sanjay discuss how India fits into the Canadian government’s Indo-Pacific strategy, the two countries’ longstanding bilateral struggles over trade and investment, and the explosive growth of the Indian diaspora in Canada. Plus, the two discuss the allegations surrounding the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the Indian government’s response, and the precarious position the Biden administration finds itself in.

Episode notes:

Sanjay Ruparelia, “The opportunities and challenges of courting India,” in Maxwell A. Cameron, David Gillies and David Carment, eds., Democracy and Foreign Policy in an Era of Uncertainty: Canada Among Nations 2022 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023): 241-268.

“Reframing Canada’s Global Engagement: Ten Strategic Choices for Decision-Makers,” Global Canada, September 2020.

Sanjay Ruparelia, “In India, the government’s election machine is humming – but the economy and democracy are at risk,” The Globe and Mail, March 22, 2022.