If all this is bad enough, it is even worse when it comes to those who, like Headley, are of Pakistani descent or were born in that country. Visa regulations are already severely restrictive for Pakistani passport holders, but a similar level of scrutiny is now applied to other passport holders with a Pakistani connection. Not only is their wait interminable, but clearance in each case is required from India’s home ministry, rather than at the discretion of the Indian embassy official dealing with the applicant (an obvious case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted). When the visa is granted, onerous restrictions are placed on the holders of Pakistani passports, including regular reporting to police stations and limitations on the places where they can travel. A markedly sympathetic Pakistani journalist was denied a second visa to India because, while officially confined to New Delhi on her first visa, she had ventured into the adjoining township of Gurgaon (which for all practical purposes is a Delhi suburb)! The objective of ‘winning friends and influencing people’ is clearly not part of the ethos of India’s visa bureaucracy.
Though some halting progress has been made by extending visa-on-arrival facilities to a handful of foreign nationalities, even these carry restrictions on the Indian airports where a visa-on-arrival can be availed of, so that tourists from the right countries arriving in the wrong airport can be (and have been) summarily sent home. The alienation and antagonism this generates among people who, for the most part, start off being generously well disposed to India is considerable, and entirely unnecessary. The same is true of the severe difficulties undergone by journalists and scholars wishing to write about India, whose visa issuance requires jumping several unreasonable hurdles (unreasonable, that is, for a democracy with a notoriously free press). Journalists and even academics deemed to be insufficiently friendly to India are often denied visas or required to produce so much documentation, or fulfil so many conditions, that they give up the effort. Some who have expressed criticisms of India in the past, whether or not these criticisms are well founded, are placed on a negative list and denied visas when they apply. Such practices are disgraceful in principle in a democracy; worse, since they are intended to avoid negative views about India appearing abroad, they ensure precisely what they are trying to prevent.
India’s ability to promote and leverage its soft power in the world will receive a major boost only if and when the country’s visa policy is thoroughly re-examined and, ideally, revised.
I must stress, of course, that hard power will continue to have its place in our world. Nonetheless, the world’s respect will no longer be accorded merely to the strongest and richest countries. Those who tell the most persuasive stories — and those about whom the most positive stories are told — will fare better in the public’s reckoning than those who win the wars. But it is essential to remember that the ‘better story’ is not merely the story that can be told; it is the story that is heard and seen (and repeated), whether or not one is trying to tell it.
In any case, the need to develop and exploit India’s considerable soft power is clear. Pursuing a soft power strategy will mean we must spend smartly on improving our infrastructure and reforming our markets to attract outsiders materially, while developing support systems and adequate financing support for artistic products. It is essential to understand that focusing more on internal investment can lead to gains in the external diplomatic front. Within the MEA, the leveraging of soft power must be done by making its promotion integral to the work of the substantive territorial divisions, rather than leaving it solely to umbrella entities like ICCR and the public diplomacy division. This will mean taking Indian literature, culture, music and dance abroad as an adjunct to Indian diplomacy, and doing so within a context of a coherent public diplomacy strategy that weaves together many institutions that currently function separately. I have made this case extensively in my other writings and speeches. In bringing my arguments together in this book, I urge the development and implementation of a soft power strategy for India.
This is where public diplomacy comes in. I once asked a distinguished senior diplomat what lay behind all the hostility I heard expressed towards the Government of India in a particular foreign country: were we not getting our message across, didn’t our critics understand what we were doing — was it ignorance or was it apathy? He replied: ‘I don’t know, and I don’t care’ (which rather explains the Indian government’s earlier public diplomacy problem).
And yet we know that none of the government’s goals can be met without the support of ordinary people around the world — the informed publics who sustain the political will of their governments. This is what makes public diplomacy necessary.
So what is public diplomacy? Our first challenge is definitional. I know that many communications experts in the West draw a distinction among the terms public diplomacy, public affairs and public relations. The United States is the country where these three terms first came into official use. Simply put, from a US government point of view, public diplomacy seeks to engage, inform and influence foreign publics in order to promote sympathy and goodwill for the United States and for American policies; public affairs seeks to encourage domestic public understanding and support of US government policies and activities; and public relations seeks to win the support of a target audience, domestic or foreign, for the work or objectives of a specific US organization or project. Though the Government of India does not use the term ‘public affairs’ at all, rarely admits to ‘public relations’ in its own dealings, and has only started speaking of ‘public diplomacy’ quite recently, the fact is that the government engages in public diplomacy, public affairs and public relations all at the same time, every day.
It is the responsibility of any government to seek to gain the support of people around the world, by reaching out to them through the media, NGOs, and other institutions of civil society as well as, where feasible, directly to the public. While the Wikileaks scandal has demonstrated anew the importance of private diplomacy — the transmission of confidential communications between governments — public diplomacy consists of what governments want the public to know and are prepared to say publicly. Ultimately, both public diplomacy and the more conventional kind have the same ultimate objective, which is to promote a country’s national interests, including the well-being and security of the people in whose name the government concerned is acting.
Public diplomacy, of course, is neither as old as Grotius, nor as new as 9/11, though both have shaped its practice. The term was coined at my alma mater, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in 1965, and it was during my time at Fletcher a decade later, in the mid-1970s, that I first came to study the subject at the Murrow Center for Public Diplomacy.