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, D.C. 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 U.S.-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-U.S. 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. 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, 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.

Last Updated: April 17, 2020

Conversation

04.26.20

How Is the Coronavirus Outbreak Affecting China’s Relations with Its Asian Neighbors?

Tanvi Madan, Daniel S. Markey & more
How has China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic—inside and outside of China—affected perceptions of China among countries in Asia? And how might this shape future policy toward China, or the regional policy landscape more broadly?

Books

02.24.20

Fateful Triangle

Tanvi Madan
Brookings Institution Press: In this Asian century, scholars, officials, and journalists are increasingly focused on the fate of the rivalry between China and India. They see the U.S.’s relationships with the two Asian giants as now intertwined, after having followed separate paths during the Cold War.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.Madan’s assessment of this formative period in the triangular relationship is of more than historic interest. A key question today is whether the United States and India can, or should, develop ever-closer ties as a way of countering China’s desire to be the dominant power in the broader Asian region. Fateful Triangle argues that history shows such a partnership is neither inevitable nor impossible. A desire to offset China brought the two countries closer together in the past, and could do so again. A look to history, however, also shows that shared perceptions of an external threat from China are necessary, but insufficient, to bring India and the United States into a close and sustained alignment. That requires agreement on the nature and urgency of the threat, as well as how to approach the threat strategically, economically, and ideologically.With its long view, Fateful Triangle offers insights for both present and future policymakers as they tackle a fateful, and evolving, triangle that has regional and global implications.{chop}