These changes are little short of revolutionary. But the Indian revolution is a democratic one, sustained by a larger idea of India — an India that safeguards the common space available to each identity, an India that celebrates diversity. If America is a melting pot, then to me India is a thali, a selection of sumptuous dishes in different bowls. Each tastes different, and does not necessarily mix with the next, but they belong together on the same plate, and they complement each other in making the meal a satisfying repast. India’s civilizational ethos has been an immeasurable asset for our country. It is essential that India does not allow the spectre of religious intolerance and political opportunism to undermine the soft power which is its greatest asset in the world of the twenty-first century. Maintain that, and true leadership in our globalizing world — the kind that has to do with principles, values and standards — will follow.
This will require the more systematic development of a soft power strategy than India currently has. So far, such strategic advantages as have accrued from India’s soft power — goodwill for the country among African, Arab and Afghan publics, for instance — have been a largely unplanned by-product of the normal emanations of Indian culture. Such goodwill has not been systematically harnessed as a strategic asset by New Delhi. It is ironic that in and around the 2008 Olympics, authoritarian China showed a greater determination to use its hard power strengths to cultivate a soft power strategy for itself on the world stage. India will not need to try as hard, but it will need to do more than it currently does to leverage its natural soft power into a valuable instrument of its global strategy.
Some commentators have pointed to the irony that while communist China avers its allegiance to Confucius, democratic India comes across as wary of projecting its culture for fear that doing so might seem insufficiently secular. Foreign Indophiles — especially in the scholarly community — have no such qualms. A German writer settled in India since the 1980s, Maria Wirth, wrote in the Garhwal Post in late 2011 about her dismay at the Government of India’s decision in 2005 to refuse to sponsor the World Sanskrit Conference in Bangkok, which had been initiated by Thailand’s crown princess, a Sanskrit scholar. (In Wirth’s recounting, once an expatriate Indian businessman had risen to the occasion and filled the sponsorship breach, an Indian government minister insisted on inaugurating the conference.)
‘India has the deepest philosophy still expressed in a vibrant religion, a huge body of literature, amazing art, dance, music, sculpture, architecture, delicious cuisine and yet Indians are in denial mode and wake up only when foreigners treasure India,’ wrote Wirth. ‘They don’t seem to know the value and, therefore, don’t take pride in their tradition, unlike Westerners who take a lot of pride in theirs, even if there is little to be proud of.’ (She ascribed this principally to the ignorance of Anglophone Indians and the inability of non-Anglophone ones to make their voices heard, though I know many English-educated Indians who are far more deeply steeped in an erudite appreciation of ancient Indian culture than many overtly chauvinist Hindi-speaking nativists. But that’s another matter.)
The charge that India has been reticent about its cultural diplomacy and noticeably unenthusiastic about leveraging its soft power is, however, one that is convincing. Despite my reluctance to indulge in comparisons with China, Beijing’s performance in this domain has been revealing. China devised the concept of Confucius Institutes only in 2004 but has already established 350 of them at universities across the world (with 260 more in the pipeline, awaiting Chinese government funding to follow suit). To these Confucius Institutes it has added 430 ‘classrooms’ affiliated with secondary schools in 103 countries. According to Chinese education ministry figures, 7000 teachers are recruited every year from Chinese universities and sent abroad to impart Chinese language and cultural instruction for two-year stints. They have reached some 100 million foreigners who are currently, according to official Chinese estimates, learning Mandarin.
By contrast, Indian governmental backing for the development and dissemination of culture has been largely formalistic. The ICCR, established as far back as in 1950, has thirty-five centres abroad and is in the process of creating eight more around the world. It also supports ninety-five academic chairs for Indian studies in universities abroad, though at very modest levels that usually require supplementing by the host institution. For the rest, it sends out travelling troupes and runs festivals of Indian culture from time to time in foreign countries. The ICCR has done good work, but at a modest level of ambition, and it has appeared to its well-wishers to be in serious need of additional resources, both financial and creative, if it is to make a serious global impact.
It is, of course, true that China’s extensive outreach is not matched by commensurate benefits in terms of goodwill because its culture is being projected by an authoritarian state that is known to impose considerable restrictions on freedom of expression. As Joseph Nye observed in the New York Times:
The 2008 Olympics were a success, but shortly afterwards, China’s domestic crackdown in Tibet and Xinjiang, and on human rights activists, undercut its soft power gains. The Shanghai Expo was also a great success, but was followed by the jailing of the Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo and the artist Ai Weiwei. And for all the efforts to turn Xinhua and China Central Television into competitors for CNN and the BBC, there is little international audience for brittle propaganda. What China seems not to appreciate is that using culture and narrative to create soft power is not easy when they are inconsistent with domestic realities.
My earlier observations about the limitations of government propaganda have been borne out by the Chinese experience. But India’s failure to leverage its soft power lies in its inability to exploit its own democratic traditions of freedom. The ICCR could serve as a framework organization and a source of catalytic funding support for principally private-sector initiatives, buttressed by the reach and enthusiasm of non-resident Indians (NRIs), the 25-million-strong Indian diaspora. In my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium I suggested that the term NRI could equally stand for ‘Not Really Indian’ and ‘Never Relinquished India’. The Not-Really-Indians are, for the most part, prone to an atavistic nostalgia that makes them yearn to rediscover their mother country, while the Never-Relinquished-Indians chronically seek to be of service to India, and are usually well heeled enough to make a difference. What is lacking is a policy to channel their enthusiasm, their commitment and their resources to the promotion of India’s image and the showcasing of Indian culture. If India sought to do that, it would find both categories of NRIs to be ‘Now-Required-Indians’.
It must be admitted, however, that in one major area of soft power failure, India has only itself to blame. If soft power is about making your country attractive to others, the Indian bureaucracy seems determined to do everything in its (not inconsiderable) power to achieve the opposite effect, in the way in which it treats foreigners wishing to travel to or reside in India. Visa processes, already time-consuming, unnecessarily demanding and expensive, have become far more cumbersome as a result of the government’s reaction to 26/11. Travellers on tourist visas may now not return to India for a period of at least two months after a previous visit — a restriction designed, it would seem, to curb a future David Coleman Headley, whose frequent trips to India (interspersed with trips to Pakistan) were aimed at ‘scoping out’ or reconnoitring the venues for the 26/11 attacks. Aside from the fact that Headley travelled on a business, not a tourist, visa, the new policy has made victims of a wide range of legitimate travellers, from tourists planning to base themselves in India while making brief forays to neighbouring countries, to frequent visitors with personal or cultural interests in India. The initial application of the new visa regulation pointed to its obvious absurdity: a man who had been in India to attend to his gravely ailing mother was not allowed to re-enter to attend her funeral because two months had not elapsed since his previous visit; a couple who had left their bags at a Mumbai hotel to make an overnight visit to Sri Lanka were not allowed to come back even to collect their luggage; in another case, an NRI who had come to India to get engaged was not permitted to return for his own wedding! Such stories, recounted by the ambassadors of the nations whose passports were held by these victims, made me cringe with embarrassment, but their wide repetition around the world certainly did India’s image a great deal of harm and therefore diminished its soft power.