This podcast features Milan Vaishnav in conversation with University of Washington Jackson School faculty Radhika Govindrajan and Sunila Kale. Our guest talked about a range of topics including his route to graduate school, how he chose his dissertation topic, mixed-methods research, and public scholarship. Vaishnav is a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program and the host of the Grand Tamasha podcast at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His primary research focus is the political economy of India, and he examines issues such as corruption and governance, state capacity, distributive politics, and electoral behavior. He also conducts research on the Indian diaspora. He is the author of When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics (Yale University Press and HarperCollins India, 2017), which was awarded the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay New India Foundation book prize for the best non-fiction book on contemporary India published in 2017.
Recorded on Feb. 2, 2026
