Tanvi Madan
Director - The India Project
Senior Fellow - Foreign Policy, Project on International Order and Strategy
Tanvi Madan is a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program, and director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Madan’s work explores India’s role in the world and its foreign policy, focusing in particular on India's relations with China and the United States. She also researches the intersection between Indian energy policies and its foreign and security policies.
Madan is the author of the book "Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations during the Cold War" (Brookings Institution Press, 2020). She is currently completing a monograph on India’s foreign policy diversification strategy, and researching her next book on the China-India-US triangle.
Previously, Madan was a Harrington doctoral fellow and teaching assistant at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. In the past, she has also been a research analyst at Brookings, and worked in the information technology industry in India.
Madan has authored a number of publications on India's foreign policy and been cited by media outlets such as the Associated Press, the Economist, the Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Madan has also appeared on a number of news shows including on the BBC, CBS, Channel NewsAsia, CNBC, Fox News, India Today TV, NDTV, NPR, and PBS.
In addition to a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin, she has a master's degree in international relations from Yale University and a bachelor's degree with honors in history from Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi, India.
Tanvi Madan is a senior fellow in the Project on International Order and Strategy in the Foreign Policy program, and director of The India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Madan’s work explores India’s role in the world and its foreign policy, focusing in particular on India’s relations with China and the United States. She also researches the intersection between Indian energy policies and its foreign and security policies.
Madan is the author of the book “Fateful Triangle: How China Shaped US-India Relations during the Cold War” (Brookings Institution Press, 2020). She is currently completing a monograph on India’s foreign policy diversification strategy, and researching her next book on the China-India-US triangle.
Previously, Madan was a Harrington doctoral fellow and teaching assistant at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. In the past, she has also been a research analyst at Brookings, and worked in the information technology industry in India.
Madan has authored a number of publications on India’s foreign policy and been cited by media outlets such as the Associated Press, the Economist, the Financial Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Madan has also appeared on a number of news shows including on the BBC, CBS, Channel NewsAsia, CNBC, Fox News, India Today TV, NDTV, NPR, and PBS.
In addition to a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin, she has a master’s degree in international relations from Yale University and a bachelor’s degree with honors in history from Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi, India.
In Fateful Triangle, Tanvi Madan argues that China’s influence on the U.S.-India relationship is neither a recent nor a momentary phenomenon. Drawing on documents from India and the United States, she shows that American and Indian perceptions of and policy toward China significantly shaped U.S.-India relations in three crucial decades, from 1949 to 1979. Fateful Triangle updates our understanding of the diplomatic history of U.S.-India relations, highlighting China’s central role in it, reassesses the origins and practice of Indian foreign policy and nonalignment, and provides historical context for the interactions between the three countries.
[On India's relations with China and the U.S.] I don’t think there’s a China debate in India anymore. The debate in New Delhi is only about how close to get to the U.S.
[Because India cannot tackle China's growing presence on its own,] you have now seen a broader switch in Indian strategy that has involved both developing its own capabilities and welcoming other external actors.
India historically has been skeptical of the U.S. as being unreliable, always attaching strings to relationships with partner countries, and then weaponizing their interdependence.
Global China: Assessing China’s growing role in the world
CANCELED – Global competition in a digital age
Revitalizing America’s alliances
It's an open question how much this [arms purchases from U.S. rivals] will end up affecting partners like India, but also countries like Indonesia and Vietnam who have these legacy relationships with Russia and are not going to give them up any time soon. In fact, there's an argument to be made that for America's Indo-Pacific objectives, you actually want these countries to maintain and build up a certain amount of military capability, and in some cases the U.S. cannot offer that capability.
The U.S.-India relationship is largely in sync, but Russia remains one major area of difference.