Grand Tamasha

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 understands of India in the decades after independence.

This year, Picador has published the third edition of India After Gandhi, which brings the book’s narrative up to the present day with a new chapter on the post-2016 Modi era.

To talk about his landmark book—and some of the themes that it covers—Ram Guha joins Milan on the podcast this week. The two discuss Gandhi’s legacy after 75 years of independence, the inspiration behind India After Gandhi, and the transformation of Indian democracy in the past decade. Plus, the two discuss the themes, events, and people from India’s history that are crying out for greater evaluation.

Episode notes:

Ramachandra Guha, “India against Gandhi — a legacy rewritten,” Financial Times, January 27, 2023.

Ritika Chopra, “Purged from NCERT Textbooks: Hindu extremists’ dislike for Gandhi, RSS ban after assassination,” Indian Express, April 8, 2023.

Ramachandra Guha, “The Cult of Modi,” Foreign Policy, November 4, 2022.

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—from Jawaharlal Nehru all the way to Narendra Modi—have failed to confront India's true economic problems, seeking easy solutions instead. As a popular frustration grew, India’s democracy suffered, leading to an upsurge in nationalism, violence, and corruption.

Mody joins Milan on the podcast this week to talk more about his book. The two discuss Mody’s controversial thesis, the inadequacy of GDP as a metric of economic development, and the parallels between pre-Partition India and India of the president. Plus, the two talk about Mody’s solutions for addressing India’s twin economic and political challenges.

Notes:

Ashoka Mody, “India’s Boom Is a Dangerous Myth,” Project Syndicate, March 29, 2023.

Ashoka Mody, “India’s Broken State,” Project Syndicate, February 20, 2023.

Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

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 investors and strengthen its balance sheets even as both the Supreme Court and India’s securities regulator are investing possible wrongdoing.

To talk more about the Adani affair, Milan is joined on the show this week by Menaka Doshi, Senior Editor at Bloomberg News. Menaka is one of India’s most respected financial journalists. She previously served as Managing Editor of BloombergQuint and Executive Editor of CNBC-TV18.

Milan and Menaka discuss the origins of the Adani Group, the allegations against them, and the future for the embattled company. Plus, the two discuss the relationship between Gautam Adani and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the risks of possible contagion.

Episode notes:

Menaka Doshi, “India’s SEBI to submit report on Adani to Court-Appointed Panel,” Bloomberg, March 29, 2023.

Menaka Doshi and Rajesh Kumar Singh, “Adani Total Gas Says Expansion and Spending Plans are Intact,” Bloomberg, February 7, 2023.

Hindenburg Group, How the World’s 3rd Richest Man is Pulling the Largest Con in Corporate History, January 24, 2023.

Adani Group, “Adani Response,” January 29, 2023.

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 delivering quality primary education for its poorest citizens despite sharing the same institutional framework and often the same demographic characteristics of other, poorly performing regions.  

To talk more about why and when the state works, Akshay joins Milan on the podcast this week. Akshay and Milan discuss the importance of norms in driving policy implementation, the stark variation in education outcomes in north India, and the ways in which authoritarianism and deliberation can coexist. Plus, the two discuss the Modi government’s New Education Policy and the future of primary education in the country. 

1. Akshay Mangla, “Social conflict on the front lines of reform: Institutional activism and girls’ education in rural India,” Public Administration and Development 42, no. 1 (2022): 95-105.

2. Akshay Mangla, “Elite Strategies and Incremental Policy Change: The Expansion of Primary Education in India,” Governance 31, no. 2 (2018): 381-399.

3. “Making Development Work for the Poor (with Rajesh Veeraraghavan),” Grand Tamasha, April 20, 2022.

4. “Rohini Nilekani on the Secret to Successful Governance,” Grand Tamasha, October 5, 2022.

India's nuclear program is often conceived as an inward-looking endeavor of secretive technocrats. But a new book by the scholar Jayita Sarkar, Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War, challenges the conventional wisdom, narrating a global story of India's nuclear program during its first forty years. 

It is a story about nuclear ambiguity, Cold War geopolitics, territorial ambition, and visionary engineers and scientists. Jayita, who is a senior lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow and the founding director of the Global Decolonization Initiative, joins Milan on the show this week to talk more about her book. 

The two discuss the elite coterie of scientists and engineers responsible for India’s nuclear program, the myth of India’s peaceful, non-violent rise, and the many global inputs to India’s nuclear ambitions. Plus, the two discuss the surprising roots of India’s controversial 1974 nuclear tests and the country’s struggles to fulfill its nuclear energy potential at home.

1. “Southern Asia's Nuclear Future with Ashley J. Tellis,” Grand Tamasha, October 26, 2022.
2. [Open-access] Jayita Sarkar, Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022).

Thirty years ago, Seema Sirohi first moved to Washington as a journalist charged with covering India’s relationship with the United States. At the time, Washington saw India as a problem—rather than a useful part of its foreign policy solution—to big, complex global challenges. 

Today, the situation could not be more different: the United States and India are deeply enmeshed in a strategic partnership that runs the gamut, from space to terrorism, and from climate change to technology. Seema, a U.S.-based columnist for the Economic Times, narrates this tectonic shift in a new book, Friends with Benefits: The India-U.S. Story.

On this week’s show, she joins Milan to discuss the book and her own personal journey. They discuss the evolution of U.S.-India ties over the past three decades, including the rocky years of the early 1990s, the breakthrough in the George W. Bush administration, and the setbacks towards the end of India’s UPA-2 government. Plus, the two discuss the Washington establishment’s blind spots on both China and Pakistan and how these have repeatedly come at the cost of greater cooperation with India in years past.

1. Narayan Lakshmanan, “Review of Seema Sirohi’s Friends with Benefits: The India-U.S. Story—Ringside view to bilateral ballet,” Hindu, February 17, 2023.
2. “Southern Asia's Nuclear Future with Ashley J. Tellis,” Grand Tamasha, October 26, 2022.
3. “U.S.-India Ties After the ‘2+2’ Summit,” with Joshua White, Grand Tamasha, April 27, 2022.

Age of Vice is the blockbuster new novel by the author Deepti Kapoor. It’s a love story, wrapped inside a tale of capitalism run amok, wrapped inside a violent story of gangland politics. 

In nearly 600 pages, it transports readers from the badlands of eastern Uttar Pradesh to the five-star hotels and fabulous bungalows of New Delhi. To call this book a sensation would be the understatement of the year. Readers have snapped up copies, book editors have issued glowing reviews, and a television series is already in the works.
 

Deepti Kapoor grew up in north India and worked for several years as a journalist in New Delhi. She’s the author of a previous novel, A Bad Character, published in 2015. 

To talk more about Age of Vice and the inspiration behind it, Deepti joins Milan on the podcast this week. They discuss Deepti’s journey from Delhi reporter to novelist, the research she conducted for the book, and the cynicism embedded in Indian politics. Plus, the two discuss the book’s adaptation for the screen and the planned trilogy of books that is in the works.

1. Ron Charles, “Deepti Kapoor’s thriller ‘Age of Vice’ starts 2023 with a bang,” Washington Post, December 29, 2022.
2. Milan Vaishnav, When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
3. Josy Joseph, A Feast of Vultures: The Hidden Business of Democracy in India (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2016). 
4. Deepti Kapoor, “Driving in Greater Noida,” Granta, February 23, 2015.

The decline of India’s parliament is a refrain that has often been repeated over the last seventy-five years of modern Indian democracy. A new book on India’s Parliament addresses the decline thesis head-on and provides a warts-and-all assessment of India’s legislative chamber.

The book is called House of the People: Parliament and the Making of Indian Democracy and its author is the scholar Ronojoy Sen. Ronojoy, a senior research fellow at the Institute of South Asia Studies at the National University of Singapore, joins Milan on the podcast this week to discuss the evolution of India’s parliament, the constitutional pre-history of legislative institutions in India, and the surprising lack of debate around universal suffrage. 

Plus, the two discuss the plague of parliamentary disruptions, the black box of conflicts of interest, and how the practice of Indian democracy transformed the institution of Parliament.

1. Madhav Khosla and Milan Vaishnav, “The Three Faces of the Indian State,” Journal of Democracy 32, no. 1 (January 2021): 111-125.
2. Ronojoy Sen, “Has the Indian Parliament stood the test of time?” Observer Research Foundation, August 15, 2022.

On February 24, the world will commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The ongoing war has fueled considerable debate among foreign policy analysts about the long-term consequences for the nature and evolution of global order. In the wake of the ongoing conflict, few relationships have been as hotly debated as the ties between India and Russia. 

In the pages of Foreign Affairs, two of the best strategic minds working on Indian foreign policy—Happymon Jacob of Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Council for Strategic and Defense Research and Sameer Lalwani of the U.S. Institute of Peace—have engaged in a serious and constructive debate on what the future holds in store for India’s relations with Russia. 

This week, Happymon and Sameer join Milan to expand on their debate. Happymon argues that we’re seeing the beginning of decoupling between Russia and India, while Sameer is skeptical. He envisions a future in which Russia-India relations, while perhaps declining, exhibit significant resilience. The trio also discusses China-Russia relations, U.S. efforts to supply India’s military, and the prospects of India serving as an honest broker to end the war.

1. Happymon Jacob, “Russia is Losing India,” Foreign Affairs, September 22, 2022.
2. Sameer Lalwani and Happymon Jacob, “Will India Ditch Russia?” Foreign Affairs, January 24, 2023.
3. “The Looming Cloud of Sanctions Over U.S.-India Relations (with Sameer Lalwani),” Grand Tamasha, September 29, 2021.
4. Sameer Lalwani and Tyler Sagerstrom, “What the India–Russia Defence Partnership Means for US Policy,” Survival (2021).
5. Sameer Lalwani, Frank O’Donnell, Tyler Sagerstrom, and Akriti Vasudeva, “The Influence of Arms: Explaining the Durability of India–Russia Alignment,” Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs, January 15, 2021.
6. Happymon Jacob, “The futility of underbalancing China,” The Indian View (newsletter), January 23, 2023.

In 2016, Ashley J. Tellis published an important paper in which he unpacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for India to become a leading, rather than a balancing, power on the global stage. This call reflected an important change in how the country’s top political leadership conceived of its role in international politics.

In the years following, Ashley and a group of collaborators have been working to flesh out what becoming a leading power would actually mean in practice. Their findings have finally been published in a new volume, Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power, edited by Ashley along with Bibek Debroy and C. Raja Mohan.

Ashley holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. On the show this week, Ashley joins Milan to talk about his latest project. He and Milan discuss India’s internal debate about its growing global role, the ideological constraints to realizing India’s economic potential, and lingering doubts about India’s liberal commitments. Plus, the two discuss whether India’s incremental pace of reforms is a harm or a hindrance to its wider ambitions.

1. Ashley J. Tellis, “Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power,” in Ashley J. Tellis, Bibek Debroy, and C. Raja Mohan, Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2022).
2. Ashley J. Tellis, “India as a Leading Power,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 4, 2016.
3. Lakshmi Puri, “The will to power: How India can become a leading power in the world,” FirstPost, January 27, 2023.
4. “Southern Asia's Nuclear Future With Ashley J. Tellis,” Grand Tamasha, October 26, 2022.