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Dan I'm Dan Kurtz Phelan, and this is the Foreign affairs interview.
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We know from the history of these kinds of nationalisms that as they consolidate more power, they become more dangerous, and they combine two elements. One is prejudice against minorities, external nationalism, and the second is deepening authoritarianism.
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India has enormous momentum. Its population has surpassed China's, making it the most populous country in the world. It is expected to become the world's third largest economy in the next few years. And as much as any country, it seems positioned to take today's geopolitical tensions and turn them to its advantage. The country's prime minister, Narendra Modi, is expected to win a third term in office this spring, cementing his political dominance. But that has come with a dark side, an assault on civil rights and democracy, which some warn will ultimately hinder India. To address that question and India's future more broadly, I was recently joined by Alyssa Ayres, Pratap Banumeta and Ashley Tellis for a foreign affairs event. Good afternoon, all. Welcome to this discussion marking the release of the March April issue of Foreign Affairs. We've got three fantastic guests, all of them foreign affairs authors, joining us today to discuss India, its upcoming election, its economic prospects, its global role in foreign policy, and, of course, its relationship with the United States. We've got a lot to cover, so I will only very briefly introduce the three of them. We'll start with Alyssa Ayres. Alyssa has been really a top India hand in both the US Government and in the American Academy over the last few decades. She is currently the dean of the Elliott School for International affairs at George Washington University. She's also a senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations. And she served in the State Department overseeing India policy in the Obama administration and also worked in government during the George W. Bush administration, when really the beginning of the modern US India relationship was being hashed out. Next we have Ashley Tellis, another top India hand, both in the US Government and in the think tank world. He is currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and he served as the senior Advisor to the U.S. ambassador to India during the George W. Bush administration, when the nuclear agreement was being hashed out and much of what we're discussing today was set on its course. And then last but not least, we have Pratap Banumhta, who is one of India's top political thinkers in a variety of roles. He's now a visiting scholar at Princeton University, but before that was vice chancellor of Ashoka University outside of Delhi and ran the center for Policy Research which was long one of India's most respected think tank or probably its most respected think tank until the government I suppose decided it was a little bit too respected and has mostly dismantled it in the last last few years. I was lucky to spend a year as a fellow at CPR when Pratap was running it a decade or so ago. He's also the author of a, of a short but brilliant book called Burden of Democracy which I highly recommend to anyone trying to understand some of the deeper roots of these issues in Indian history. So thank you so much to all three of you for joining us today and for the work you've done in foreign affairs over the years. Pratap, I'm going to, I'm going to start with you as we are of course looking towards India's elections in the next couple of months. And as we do, Prime Minister Modi's dominance is such that I think there's little doubt about his victory and so little need to speculate on election outcomes. But I do think it's worth taking this as an opportunity to step back a bit and reflect on how Modi has established such dominance over the last 10 years in office. He was elected as a somewhat controversial and divisive figure, but he really has established, to use the word that the historian Ram Duha used in a piece in the current issue of Foreign affairs, supremacy over Indian politics. So as you, as you look over that record, what do you think the key reasons for that supremacy are?
