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In December, India will assume the presidency of the G20, an international forum comprising the world’s twenty largest economies. It’s India’s first time chairing the group, and it represents a major diplomatic and political opportunity for the government to shape perceptions around India’s role in the world and to make headway on some of its key priorities heading into 2024, a general election year.

To discuss India’s agenda at the G20 and its approach to multilateralism more generally, Milan is joined on the show this week by the scholar Karthik Nachiappan. Karthik is a research fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and a nonresident senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa. Karthik is the author of the book, Does India Negotiate?, which revises the conventional narrative that India’s multilateral behavior is prickly, obstructionist, and defensive.

Milan and Karthik discuss India’s emerging G20 agenda, its attitude toward existing multilateral institutions, and what its behavior at the recent COP27 climate summit tells us about its evolving approach. Plus, the two discuss India’s digital soft power ambitions and how those aims could conflict with international concerns about data localization.

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

This season, in twenty episodes, Grand Tamasha has covered a lot of ground—from the war in Ukraine, to the UP elections, and India’s water crisis. We will be taking a little break to recharge our batteries, but we will be back in August with all-new Grand Tamasha content.

To bring the curtains down on the seventh season of Grand Tamasha, Milan is joined on the podcast by podcast regulars, Sadanand Dhume of the American Enterprise Institute and Wall Street Journal and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution. 

The trio discusses the foreign policy crisis which engulfed India last week after two BJP spokespersons made statements criticizing the Prophet Mohammed; the 180-degree turn in popular perceptions of India’s stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and how India was received at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore.

Plus, the three offer their summer reading recommendations for India policy enthusiasts.

1. Sadanand Dhume, “Hindu Nationalism Threatens India’s Rise as a Nation,” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2022. 
2. Shoaib Daniyal, “The India Fix,” Scroll.in.
3. Carnegie India, “Ideas and Institutions,” Carnegie India.
4. Ananth Krishnan, “The India-China Newsletter.”
5. Suyash Desai, “The PLA Bulletin.”
6. Manoj Kewalramani, “Eye on China,” Takshashila Institution.

What kind of world power does India want to be? Few questions have been asked as often or as intensely since India’s economic take-off in the early 1990s and the corresponding rise in its foreign policy ambitions. 

Many of our intellectual debates seek answers to this question by looking back to the dawn of independence in 1947. A new book by political scientist Rahul Sagar, To Raise a Fallen People: How Nineteenth Century Indians Saw Their World and Shaped Ours, invites readers to look even further back to the oft-forgotten, raucous debates of the 19th century. 

Rahul joins Milan on the podcast this week to talk about his new book and the intellectual roots of India’s strategic thought. Milan and Rahul discuss the debate over India’s strategic culture, its “half-hearted” approach to great power politics, and the salience of 19th-century debates for understanding the current foreign policy discourse on Russia-Ukraine.

1. Rahul Sagar, “If it doesn’t learn from the past, the West can lose India (again),” Times of India, May 22, 2022.
2. Rahul Sagar, The Progressive Maharaja: Sir Madhava Rao's Hints on the Art and Science of Government (London: Hurst, 2022). 
3. Rahul Sagar, “‘Jiski Lathi, Uski Bhains’: The Hindu Nationalist View of International Politics,” in Kanti Bajpai, Saira Basit, and V. Krishnappa, eds., India’s Grand Strategy: History, Theory, Cases (New Delhi: Routledge, 2016).

French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot’s new book, Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, is a comprehensive exploration of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi—its origins, policies, philosophy, and relationship to democracy. 

Patrick Heller of Brown University calls the book “the most detailed, theoretically sophisticated, and comprehensive analysis of the rise of Modi’s BJP as a dominant electoral force.”

Christophe joins Milan on the podcast to talk about Modi’s rise to national prominence, his relationship with the Sangh Parivar, and the constraints that exist on his power. Plus, the two discuss the state of individual freedoms in India today and why Christophe believes that the BJP dominance under Modi represents a new political system in India, rather than just a new party system.

Episode notes:

1. Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil, India’s First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-77 (Oxford University Press, 2021).
2. Angana P. Chatterji, Thomas Blom Hansen, and Christophe Jaffrelot, eds., Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India (Oxford University Press, 2019).
3. “Christophe Jaffrelot on India’s First Dictatorship,” Grand Tamasha, April 13, 2021.

It has been a harrowing week for India. The country is reeling under the effects of a devastating second wave of the coronavirus, which is responsible for more than 300,000 new cases a day and more than 2,000 fatalities. And these official numbers are almost certainly a dramatic undercount. 

To understand what is driving this new second wave of the virus and the global health implications of the surge, professor Anup Malani joins Milan on the show this week. Anup is the Lee and Brena Freeman professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a professor at the Pritzker School of Medicine. 

Anup and Milan discuss India’s second COVID wave—what we know, what we don’t know, and what we need to find out. Plus, they discuss the findings of numerous serological studies Anup and his co-authors have conducted across India, the contested role of lockdowns, and the worrying prospect of vaccine nationalism. 

Episode notes:

1. Anup Malani, “Research Notes” newsletter
2. Serological studies carried out by Anup Malani and his co-authors
3. Arvind Gupta et al, “To Friends in the United States: Facilitate Global Vaccine Manufacturing”
4. Amanda Glassman and Rachel Silverman, “The International Community Has One Job: Getting COVID-19 Under Control”