Grand Tamasha

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.  

Our Grand Tamasha top three books of 2022 (drumroll, please): Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and IndependenceBy Shrayana Bhattacharya. Published by HarperCollins India. The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao’s Hints on the Art and Science of GovernmentBy Rahul Sagar. Published by Hurst/HarperCollins India. The Newlyweds: Rearranging Marriage in Modern IndiaBy Mansi Choksi. Published by Atria/Icon/Penguin Viking. In this episode, Milan talks about why he loved each of these books and includes short clips from his conversations with Shrayana, Rahul, and Mansi. Think of this bonus episode as our little holiday present to you, our listeners. We'll see you in January.

“A Test of the BJP’s Dominance in Gujarat (with Mahesh Langa),” Grand Tamasha, December 6, 2022.  “Previewing India’s G20 Agenda (with Karthik Nachiappan),” Grand Tamasha, November 30, 2022. “Congress Drama, Indian Diplomacy, and the Diaspora (with Sadanand Dhume and Tanvi Madan),” Grand Tamasha, October 12, 2022.

Karthik Nachiappan, Does India Negotiate? (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2020) Karthik Nachiappan, “The international politics of data: When control trumps protection,” Observer Research Foundation, October 26, 2022. Arindrajit Basu and Karthik Nachiappan, “Data opportunity at the G20,” Hindu, August 18, 2022. “How Rising Powers Can Make—Or Break—International Order” (with Rohan Mukherjee), Grand Tamasha, November 16, 2022.  

Semafor “Climate” newsletter by Bill Spindle.  Bill Spindle, “Energy: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly,” The Energy Adventure(r) newsletter, June 14, 2022. Bill Spindle, “The Free Power Flywheel,” The Energy Adventure(r) newsletter, August 29, 2022. Bill Spindle, “Global climate conference threatens to be a bust,” Semafor, October 22, 2022. “How India Can Get to Net Zero Emissions (with Jayant Sinha),” Grand Tamasha, October 13, 2021. “What COP26 Means for India—and the World (with Navroz Dubash),” Grand Tamasha, November 17, 2021.