Grand Tamasha

Later this summer, California could be first American state to ban discrimination on the basis of caste. California’s move, and the moves by universities, cities, and towns across the country, to raise issues of caste discrimination has generated a massive controversy that is roiling the Indian American community in the United States. One reporter, the freelance journalist Sonia Paul, has been doggedly pursuing this story for years, even before it became a mainstream news issue. Sonia is an award-winning journalist, writer, producer and story editor based in Oakland, California, and she is the daughter of immigrants from India and the Philippines. Sonia joins Milan on the show this week to talk more about her reporting and the state of caste in America. Sonia and Milan discuss the difficulties of reporting on caste in America, the coded ways in which discrimination often takes place, and the debates in the Indian American community over moves to add caste as a protected category. Plus, the two discuss the fierce contest over California’s draft legislation. Episode notes: Sonia Paul, “The hidden caste codes of Silicon Valley,” BBC, April 18, 2023.Sonia Paul, “Trapped in Silicon Valley’s Hidden Caste System,” Wired, March 1, 2022.“California Could Become the First State to Ban Caste Discrimination,” KQED “The Bay” (podcast), June 5, 2023.Sumitra Badrinathan, Devesh Kapur, Jonathan Kay, and Milan Vaishnav, “Social Realities of Indian Americans: Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 9, 2021.Maari Zwick-Maitreyi, Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Natasha Dar, Ralph F. Bheel, and Prathap Balakrishnan, Caste in the United States: A Survey of Caste Among South Asian Americans (Equality Labs, 2018).Sonia Paul, “From Black Lives Matter, activists for India’s discriminated Dalits learn tactics to press for dignity,” The World, November 12, 2015.Patrick Cox, “Which version of Indian history do American school students learn?,” The World, April 27, 2017. 

 Leaders come and go, but institutions stay forever. This is the central takeaway of a new book by Subhashish Bhadra, Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back. Subhashish is an economist whose career has straddled both the policy and corporate worlds. He has worked at a leading global management consulting firm, a venture capital firm, and a tech start-up, working closely with CEOs, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, politicians and academics throughout his career. His new book is a call to action that encourages Indians to move beyond their fixation with leaders and focus instead on building strong state institutions. While discussions of state capacity are typically the stuff of academic conference rooms and think tank seminars, Bhadra believes they should be at the core of everyday discussions Indians have on the future of their democracy. Subhashish joins Milan on the show this week to discuss his motivations for writing the book, the institutional flaws in Indian democracy, the need for a new “social contract” on welfare, and the appropriate balance between states and markets in India. Plus, Subhashish explains what ordinary citizens can do to change the status quo. Episode notes: Anirudh Burman, “Resisting the Leviathan: The Key Change in India’s New Proposal to Protect Personal Data,” Carnegie India, November 28, 2022.Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah, In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Economic Policy (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2022).Devesh Kapur, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and Milan Vaishnav, eds.Rethinking Public Institutions in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2017). 

If you’ve spent any time reading books, watching movies about—or traveling to—India—chances are you’ve come across the depiction of an urban slum somewhere along the way. In most of these popular portrayals, slums are dens of inequity and deprivation. Citizens appear to be trapped in a vortex of poverty, bad governance, and corruption. In these stories, politicians and their henchmen appear to have the last laugh, extracting whatever they can from citizens who have few exit options.A new book by the political scientists Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, Migrants and Machine Politics, informs us that much of what we think we know is based on myth, not fact.Adam and Tariq join Milan on the podcast this week to discuss a decade’s worth of research in the slums of Bhopal and Jaipur. The trio discuss what slums look like from the bottom-up rather than the top-down, the realities of machine politics in India, and the surprising agency that poor citizens possess. Plus, they discuss how two trends—centralization and Hindu nationalism—might shape the future of local politics. Episode notes:Adam Auerbach et al. “Rethinking the Study of Electoral Politics in the Developing World: Reflections on the Indian Case,” Perspectives on Politics 20, no. 1 (2022): 250-264.Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, “Cultivating Clients: Reputation, Responsiveness, and Ethnic Indifference in India's Slums,” American Journal of Political Science 64, no. 3 (2020): 471-487.Adam Auerbach and Tariq Thachil, “How Clients Select Brokers: Competition and Cho

Since Independence, the Indian state has grappled with a variety of internal security challenges—insurgencies, terrorist attacks, caste and communal violence, riots, and electoral violence. Their toll has claimed more lives than all of India's five external wars combined.Despite this, we know surprisingly little about the institutions of the state tasked with managing internal security. How well has India contained violence and preserved order? How have the approaches and capacity of the State evolved to attain these twin objectives?  And what impact does the State's approach have on civil liberties and the quality of democracy?These are three questions that a new book, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State, takes up. It’s an important new volume co-edited by two of the best-known political scientists working on India—Amit Ahuja of the University of California-Santa Barbara and Devesh Kapur of Johns Hopkins-SAIS.Amit and Devesh join Milan on the podcast this week to discuss their new book and the lessons it holds for law and order in India. The trio discuss the centralization of internal security powers, the surprising decline in public violence, and the explosion in the size of India’s paramilitary forces. Plus, the three debate whether violence has moved from the periphery of Indian politics to center stage. Soutik Biswas, “Is India seeing a decline in violence?” BBC News, January 16, 2023. Ajai Shukla, “India's tryst with counterinsurgency,” Business Standard, March 15, 2023. Devesh Kapur, “The worrying rise of militarisation in India’s Central Armed Police Forces,” ThePrint, November 29, 2017. Amit Ahuja and Devesh Kapur, “Internal security threats: the 1980s,”Hindustan Times, 2022.  

Ramachandra Guha, one of India's most celebrated historians, revisits his landmark book 'India After Gandhi.' He discusses Gandhi's complex legacy in the context of contemporary India, particularly the BJP's ambivalence towards his ideals. Guha highlights significant omissions in history textbooks and the rise of majoritarianism. He also examines the erosion of democratic institutions and media freedom, detailing how elite complicity affects governance. Lastly, he advocates for a deeper exploration of India's post-independence history, urging scholars to investigate overlooked themes.

 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.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). 

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 how 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.

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.

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