Milan Vaishnav is a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program 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 also the host of “Grand Tamasha,” a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by Carnegie and the Hindustan Times.

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. He is also editor of Institutional Roots of India’s Security Policy, co-editor (with Devesh Kapur) of Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India (Oxford University Press, 2018) and co-editor (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur) of Rethinking Public Institutions in India (Oxford University Press, 2017). His work has been published in scholarly journals such as American Journal of Political Science, Asian Survey, Governance, India Review, Journal of Democracy, Perspectives on Politics, PS: Political Science and Politics, and Studies in Indian Politics. He is a regular contributor to the Hindustan Times.

Previously, he worked at the Center for Global Development, where he served as a postdoctoral research fellow, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Council on Foreign Relations. He has previously taught at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington Universities. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University.

If you would like to contact Milan via email, please write to: mvaishnav (at) ceip (dot) org. You can follow him on Twitter @MilanV.

You can download his CV (updated January 2025) here.