#ObamaInIndia: Can Obama’s visit to New Delhi revive US-India relations?

Speaker Biographies

Indrani Bagchi is senior diplomatic editor with The Times of India, where she covers daily news on foreign affairs in the foreign office and interprets and analyzes global trends with an Indian perspective. She also pens the Globespotting blog. She joined The Times of India in 2004. Earlier, she was associate editor for India Today, a premier news magazine. She started her journalism career at The Statesman, where she was the weekend editor, before moving to The Economic Times in Calcutta to edit Metro Magazine. Bagchi has also been a Reuters Fellow at Oxford University. In 2010, she was awarded the Chang Lin-Tien fellowship by the Asia Foundation to study US-China relations at the Brookings Institution. Follow her on Twitter @horror06.

Lisa Curtis analyzes America’s economic, security, and political relationships with India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other nations of South Asia as a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. She has testified before Congress on more than a dozen occasions in recent years on topics related to India, Pakistan, radical Islamists, and America’s image abroad. Before joining Heritage in August 2006, Curtis was a member of the professional staff of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee for three years, where she was in charge of South Asia issues for the chairman at the time, Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN). From 2001 to 2003, she was the White House–appointed senior adviser to the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, tracking India-Pakistan relations. Curtis worked as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency in the late 1990s. She also served abroad in the Foreign Service in the mid-1990s when she was assigned to the US embassies in Pakistan and India. She has been part of official missions to the region, including a US Department of Commerce–led delegation to initiate the US-India High Technology Working Group in November 2002 and the US delegation to the International Donors Conference in Pakistan to raise funds for earthquake victims in November 2005.

Sadanand Dhume is a resident fellow at AEI. He writes about South Asian political economy, foreign policy, business, and society, with a focus on India and Pakistan. He is also a South Asia columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review in India and Indonesia and was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, DC. His political travelogue about the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia, “My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist” (Skyhorse Publishing, 2009), has been published in four countries. He has twice been selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of the world’s top 100 Twitterati. Follow him on Twitter @dhume.

Milan Vaishnav is an associate in 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. One of his ongoing major projects examines the causes and consequences of political corruption in India, with an emphasis on representation and quality of political leadership, connections between the state and private capital, and the management and exploitation of natural resources. He also works on development policy and issues of governance in developing countries and their relation to democratic accountability. Vaishnav is the coeditor of the book “Short of the Goal: US Policy and Poorly Performing States” (Center for Global Development, 2006). His work has also been published in the Latin American Research Review. Previously, he worked at the Center for Global Development, where he served as a postdoctoral research fellow; Center for Strategic and International Studies; and Council on Foreign Relations. He has taught at Columbia, Georgetown, and George Washington Universities.