Milan Vaishnav's Blog, page 3

May 8: #IndiaElects2019 Event in D.C.

For those in D.C., Carnegie is hosting the second installment in our #IndiaElects2019 series on Tuesday, May 8 from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. An all-star cast–James Crabtree of the LKY School, Sadanand Dhume of AEI, and Tanvi Madan of Brookings–will discuss the Modi government’s first four years in office and the pivot to next year’s general elections, scheduled for Spring 2019. The conversation will cover economics, politics, foreign policy and everything in between.

You can RSVP here. For those not in Washington, we’ll post video as soon as the event is done.

New Carnegie initiative: “India Elects 2019”

Today, we launched a brand new Carnegie Endowment initiative called “India Elects 2019.” This initiative, which builds on what we did four years ago (with “India Decides 2014“), attempts to provide timely research and analysis on electoral trends in India ahead of next year’s general election.

The first essay in the series, “From Cakewalk to Contest,” provides a macro picture of where the race stands today. Here’s a glimpse:

Electoral outcomes are notoriously difficult to predict in India’s fragmented, hypercompetitive democracy. But one need not go out on a limb to declare that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be the clear favorite if the election were held today…Yet the election’s clear front-runner is far from invulnerable, despite anticipation of a BJP cakewalk in 2019. Although the intricacies of the upcoming race—such as the selection of candidates and the rhetoric of campaigns—remain unknown one year out, underlying structural conditions suggest far rockier terrain may lie ahead. In particular, four crucial objectives keep BJP strategists up at night: expanding beyond regional strongholds, recruiting new—and retaining old—coalition partners, withstanding a disappointing economic performance, and contending with fluctuations in voter mobilization. The party’s performance in the 2019 election will hinge largely on its ability to address these potential vulnerabilities and the opposition’s ability to exploit them.

This year, we have partnered with the Hindustan Times, which will carry our original content in print and online. We will also collaborate with them on infographics and video. HT put together a lovely full-page spread for our inaugural piece:

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You can read the full Carnegie essay here.

 

New York Review of Books on India: “A Mighty Wind”

Max Rodenbeck of The Economist has an excellent essay on Modi and the BJP in the April 19 edition of the New York Review of Books. The essay is primarily a review of Prashant Jha’s excellent, How the BJP Wins, but the author very kindly weaves in a review of my own book, When Crime Pays. Here’s a selection:

In recent years the BJP has mopped up an ever-growing share of this pool; the election commission says that 80 percent of all corporate political funding in Gujarat in the three years before November’s election went to Modi’s party. As Milan Vaishnav points out in When Crime Pays, a thorough, disturbing, and often amusing scholarly analysis of the seamy side of Indian politics, this imbalance may be seen as payback. In the 1960s, Congress received as much as thirty times more in corporate donations than any other party.

The essay is very well-crafted and highly readable. You can read the entire thing here.

My review of Snigdha Poonam’s “Dreamers”

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I cannot recommend Snigdha Poonam’s new book, Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing Their World, strongly enough. I found it to be one of the most insightful books of recent vintage when it comes to explaining the social churning that is going on in 21st century India.

I wrote a review of the book for Foreign Affairs. Here’s the key takeaway:

Dreamers smashes the slick hype that has been constructed around India’s aspiring middle classes, calling our attention to the corruption, frustration, and dashed hopes bubbling beneath the surface. It may be convenient for India’s elites to whitewash these inconvenient truths. But, as Poonam shows, it would also be suicidal.

You can read the full review here.

New column: The credibility crisis facing India’s elite institutions

Last week, I published a lengthy column in Mint on the credibility crisis facing India’s elite institutions.

To make a long story short, we have long assumed that India’s apex institutions function reasonably well even while its lower level limbs and appendages struggle. This is at the core of Lant Pritchett’s notion of India as a “flailing” state. Unfortunately, recent events raise questions about just how healthy the “head”–these elite institutions–are.

To quote the piece:

Against this backdrop, one cannot help but reflect on recent events and wonder whether India’s elite institutions are as healthy as we had once thought. In the last 12 months, each of the aforementioned institutions [the Election Commission of India, Reserve Bank of India, and the Supreme Court] has experienced a crisis of credibility. These events—and the systemic infirmities they point to—suggest that we should no longer take the health of these apex institutions for granted.

You can read the entire column here.