New Delhi, Sept. 22 -- Last week, the Grand Tamasha podcast released its 300th episode. The weekly podcast on Indian policy and politics, coproduced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, began as an experiment in the run-up to India's 2019 general elections. Seven years and 300 episodes later, it has become a fixture among those-both inside and outside of India-seeking to deepen their understanding of the country's politics, economy, foreign policy, and culture. To commemorate this milestone, veteran India-watchers Sadanand Dhume and Tanvi Madan joined host Milan Vaishnav to discuss the latest developments in India. Dhume is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Madan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. The conversation began with a discussion of the political fallout from this summer's Gen Z protests, the political future of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)-an online collective that began as satire-and the churn within the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). "Nobody saw these people coming. Nobody imagined that something would grow out of an X (formerly Twitter) post and an Instagram post so quickly and become something on the ground," said Dhume. "The fact that so many people who came out were traditionally BJP supporters, and the fact that they managed to tap into a very real resentment about this broken examination system and translate that into a tangible political win, was surprising to me." Dhume added that Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan being forced to resign "spoke to how well the CJP managed to exploit that moment to achieve that." He went on to say that India's political mood has decisively shifted. "You see a kind of discontent there that you have not seen before," Dhume said. "If I were in the BJP, the deep dissension in the base would worry me the most, and the kind of language that some of these Hindutva influencers use against the prime minister is quite unprecedented." On the foreign policy front, the trio discussed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the potential thaw in India-China relations. "I think you'll see a fair bit of consensus, including now from the Chinese side, that what you're seeing is a thaw, an attempt to stabilise the border, to find a floor for the relationship," explained Madan. "If that happens, there may be ways to explore cooperation on the economic side, though there's still a debate in India on that question. But there is no big strategic reset, no shift away from strategic rivalry. The competition persists." Madan emphasised that the meeting between Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Brics Summit should not be viewed as a "major rapprochement"; rather, she said, "it's an attempt to see what's possible." She added that, for Xi, it is worth keeping in mind that the summit is taking place before his visit to the United States to meet with President Donald Trump. As he prepares for that meeting, Xi "wants to go with the wind at his back, saying, 'I am the stable, predictable power with lots of friends.'"...