Grand Tamasha

In 2016, Ashley J. Tellis published an important paper in which he unpacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for India to become a leading, rather than a balancing, power on the global stage. This call reflected an important change in how the country’s top political leadership conceived of its role in international politics.In the years following, Ashley and a group of collaborators have been working to flesh out what becoming a leading power would actually mean in practice. Their findings have finally been published in a new volume, Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power, edited by Ashley along with Bibek Debroy and C. Raja Mohan.Ashley holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. On the show this week, Ashley joins Milan to talk about his latest project. He and Milan discuss India’s internal debate about its growing global role, the ideological constraints to realizing India’s economic potential, and lingering doubts about India’s liberal commitm