Gurcharan Das is one of India's best-known authors and thinkers. He had a celebrated career in business, most notably as the CEO of Procter and Gamble in India, before devoting his full attention to writing. He is the author of numerous best-selling books, including India Unbound, The Difficulty of Being Good, and India Grows at Night. Most recently, Das has written a new book called The Dilemma of the Indian Liberal, in which he recounts his own professional and intellectual journey and traces how and why he became a liberal. In telling his own story, he also narrates the story of an India th ..read more

This week on Grand Tamasha, Milan is joined by Grand Tamasha’s India news roundup regulars: Sadanand Dhume of the Wall Street Journal and the American Enterprise Institute and Tanvi Madan of the Brookings Institution. On the show this week, the trio discusses the 2024 Indian general election and its aftermath.  They debate the politics, as well as the economic and foreign policy implications of the result. Did Rahul Gandhi rehabilitate himself? Will coalition politics derail economic reforms? How are foreign capitals reacting to the surprise result?  Milan, Tanvi, and Sadanand discus ..read more

On Sunday night, India’s new National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government was sworn into office, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at its helm once more. We have a new group of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) allies, a new group of ministers, and a new look in terms of how the Modi government will function in its third term. However, the economic challenges the new government faces are quite old. Many experts believe that concerns about inflation, jobs, and lack of upward mobility dented the BJP’s electoral prospects in the recent general election. To talk about the Indian economy and the steps ..read more

We’ve finally come to the end of the 46-day Indian general election. And we have a surprising result which many experts did not see coming. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi failed to secure a single-party majority in the Lok Sabha in what is being interpreted as a major setback. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) did, however, win a majority and is set to form a new government on June 8th under Modi’s leadership. The opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) grouping, in turn, performed much better than expected, winning 233 ..read more

Gujarat Under Modi: Laboratory of Today’s India is a new book by the scholar Christophe Jaffrelot but one that has an old backstory. It is the definitive account of Narendra Modi’s tenure as chief minister of the state of Gujarat. And it helps place into context the changes we’ve seen in national politics, economic policy, and society over the past ten years under Prime Minister Modi. It is a book that the author started researching twenty years ago and is finally out in the world. To talk more about the book, Christophe joins Milan on the show this week. He is the Avantha Chair and Professor ..read more

Over the last five years, Milan has interviewed authors of big books, that have brought innovative new ideas to the India policy debate.  And he’s also interviewed authors of lengthy books. On the show this week, he sits down with an author who’s written a big book in every sense of the term. It is no stretch to say that Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance is one of the most important books written about the political economy of India’s development. Over 600 pages and 200 pages of notes, it takes readers on an exhaustive deep dive of India’s gove ..read more

Breaking the Mould: India’s Untraveled Path to Prosperity is a big new book by the economists Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba. The book is both a critique of India’s development model as well as a manifesto for reform. Most notably, it challenges the conventional wisdom that India’s primary goal should be to transform the country into a blue-collar manufacturing powerhouse. Rajan and Lamba argue that India cannot duplicate China’s development model, but it has the opportunity to leapfrog by focusing higher up the value chain. To discuss the book’s ideas and its policy implications, Milan is joi ..read more

The third phase of India’s 44-day long polls took place this week with voting held in 94 constituencies across 12 states. Thus far, the elections have been marked by lower-than-expected turnout, intensifying communal rhetoric, and a sharp debate about inequality and redistribution. Against this backdrop, the New York Times Magazine recently published an essay by the journalist Samanth Subramanian titled, “Time Is Running Out for Rahul Gandhi’s Vision for India.” The essay was based on a reporting trip in February of this year in which Samanth traveled Uttar Pradesh with Rahul Gandhi, the forme ..read more

The incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi entered this election as the clear favorite with every single pre-election survey pointing a decisive victory. However, the party is leaving no stone unturned in its effort to notch a third consecutive parliamentary majority. To discuss the BJP’s campaign, Milan is joined on the show this week by Smriti Kak Ramachandran, a veteran journalist who covers the BJP for the Hindustan Times. Smriti has spent over a decade in journalism combining old fashioned leg work with modern story telling tools. Milan and Smriti discuss h ..read more

As India heads to the polls, a new chapter is being written in a very old debate about poverty and inequality in India. This debate has been stirred up by the release of new data from a government-sponsored consumption survey, which some have argued shows a massive decline in poverty in India. Others believe that this data are not so unequivocal and point to a widening gap between top income-earners and ordinary Indians.  To make sense of this debate, Milan is joined on the show this week by Maitreesh Ghatak. Maitreesh is a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, where h ..read more