Making the most of India's soft power

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Making the most of India's soft power
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
January 28, 2007

This newspaper's 'India Poised' campaign has touched a chord. Observers speak of India's geo-strategic advantages, its economic dynamism and record growth, political stability, proven military capabilities, its nuclear, space and missile programmes, the entrepreneurial energy of our people and the country's growing pool of young and skilled manpower as assuring India's future.

But the greatest asset of all may be something less tangibly measurable — our soft power. The term 'soft power' is all the rage today. It was coined by Harvard's Joseph Nye to describe a country's ability to alter the behaviour of others through attraction rather than sticks or carrots.

Hard power is necessary but has its limitations: Afghanistan and Vietnam have taught us that the side with the larger army doesn't always win. But the side with the better story, the more attractive culture, and more numerous channels of communication, always does better than the one which only has guns.

This is hardly news. When France lost the war of 1870 to Prussia, one of its most important steps to rebuild the nation's shattered morale and enhance its prestige was to create the Alliance Francaise to promote French language and literature throughout the world. French culture has remained a major selling-point for French diplomacy ever since.

The UK has the British Council, the Swiss have Pro Helvetia, and Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal have, respectively, institutes named for Goethe, Cervantes, Dante Alighieri and Gulbenkian. Today, China has started establishing 'Confucius Institutes' to promote Chinese culture internationally.

But soft power does not rely merely on governmental action: for the US, Hollywood and MTV have done more to promote the idea of America as a desirable and admirable society than the Voice of America or the Fulbright scholarships. "Soft power," Nye says, "is created partly by governments and partly in spite of them."

What does this mean for India? It means giving attention, encouragement and active support to the aspects and products of our society that the world would find attractive — not in order directly to persuade others to support India, but rather to enhance our country's intangible standing in their eyes.

Bollywood is already doing this by bringing its brand of glitzy entertainment not just to the Indian diaspora in the US or UK but to the screens of Syrians and Senegalese — who may not understand the Hindi dialogue but catch the spirit of the films, and look at India with stars in their eyes as a result.

(An Indian diplomat friend in Damascus a few years ago told me that the only publicly-displayed portraits that were as big as those of then-President Hafez al-Assad were those of Amitabh Bachchan.) Indian art, classical music and dance, Indian fashions, have the same effect.

Indian cuisine, spreading around the world, raises our culture higher in people's reckoning; the way to foreigners' hearts is through their palates. In England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding industries combined.

When Indian filmmakers or sportspeople succeed internationally or when Indian writers win the Booker or Pulitzer Prizes, our country's soft power is enhanced. (Ask yourself how many Chinese novelists the typical literate American reader can name. Indeed, how many non-Western countries can claim a presence in the Occidental mind comparable to India's?)

And when Americans speak of the IITs with the same reverence they used to accord to MIT or Caltech, and the Indianness of engineers and software developers is taken as synonymous with mathematical and scientific excellence, it is India that gains in respect. The stereotyped image of the Indian is no longer the 'half-naked fakir' but the computer geek.

In the information age, as a society with a free press and a thriving mass media, with a people whose creative energies are daily encouraged to express themselves in a variety of appealing ways, India has an extraordinary ability to tell stories that are more persuasive and attractive than those of its rivals.

This is not about propaganda; indeed, it will not work if it is directed from above, least of all by government. But its impact, though intangible, can be huge.

To take one example: Afghanistan is clearly a crucial country for our national security. But the most interesting asset for India in Afghanistan doesn't come out of our diplomacy, but from one simple fact: Don't try to telephone an Afghan at 8:30 in the evening.

That's when the Indian TV soap opera Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, dubbed into Dari, is telecast on Tolo TV, and no one wishes to miss it. It's the most popular television show in Afghan history, considered directly responsible for a spike in the sale of generator sets and even for absences from religious functions which clash with its broadcast times.

Saas has so thoroughly captured the public imagination in Afghanistan that, in this deeply conservative Islamic country where family problems are usually hidden behind the veil, it's an Indian TV show that has come to dominate society's discussion of family issues.

I have read reports of wedding banquets being interrupted so that the guests could huddle around the television for half-an-hour, and even of an increase in crime at 8:30 pm because watchmen are sneaking a look at the TV rather than minding the store.

One Reuters dispatch recounted how robbers in Mazar-i-Sharif stripped a vehicle of its wheels and mirrors recently during the telecast time and wrote on the car, in an allusion to the show's heroine, Tulsi Zindabad. That's soft power, and India does not have to thank the government or charge the taxpayer for its exercise. Instead, Indians too can simply say, Tulsi Zindabad.

 

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More on “soft power”
By Shashi Tharoor
Weekly Column "Shashi on Sunday" in "The Times of India"
February 11, 2007

In an earlier column (28 January) I spoke of how India’s “soft power” was a huge asset that had little to do with the government, thanks to Bollywood, TV shows and the exportable products of India’s popular culture. Of course official government policy can also play a role. Pavan Varma, the current head of the Indian Council on Cultural Relations, has argued in the pages of this paper that “culturally India is a superpower” and that cultural diplomacy must be pursued for political ends, “keeping in mind our priorities on a global scale”. I don’t disagree with him.

A casual glance at last year’s calendar already shows how India is consciously seeking to leverage its soft power in Europe. India dominated discussions of the "creative imperative" at Davos in January, was "partner country" for the Hanover Trade Fair in May and then "theme country" at the Bonn Biennale, a cultural festival for theatre lovers, starred as the “country of honour” at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, before November saw the Festival of India attract throngs in Brussels. That Festival demonstrated what India is consciously trying to showcase, incorporating as it did a classic exhibition of iconic Indian art from the last 1500 years, exquisite paintings in the Kangra style, contemporary photographic expositions on Satyajit Ray, performances by some of India's world-renowned artistes in music, dance and theatre, a food festival, a fashion show and inevitably a section on business opportunities in India.

That’s all very well, and kudos to the ICCR for organizing it. But I would argue that soft power is not just what we can deliberately and consciously put on display; it is rather how others see what we are, whether or not we are trying to show it to the world. To take a totally different example: the sight in May 2004 of a leader of Roman Catholic background (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) -- in a country 81% Hindu -- caught the world's imagination and won its admiration. No strutting nationalist chauvinism could ever have accomplished for India's standing in the world what that one moment did -- all the more so since it was not directed at the world.

So it is not just material accomplishments that enhance our soft power. Even more important are the values and principles for which India stands. After all, Mahatma Gandhi won us our Independence through the use of soft power – because non-violence and satyagraha were indeed classic uses of soft power before the term was even coined. Pandit Nehru was also a skilled exponent of soft power: he developed a role for India in the world based entirely on its civilizational history and its moral standing, making India the voice of the oppressed and the marginalized against the big power hegemons of the day. This gave the country enormous standing and prestige across the world for some years, and strengthened our own self-respect as we stood, proud and independent, on the world stage. But the great flaw in Nehruji’s approach was that his soft power was unrelated to any acquisition of hard power; as the humiliation of 1962 demonstrated, soft power has crippling limitations. Instead of Theodore Roosevelt’s maxim, “speak softly and carry a big stick,” we spoke loudly but had no stick at all. Soft power becomes credible when there is hard power behind it; that is why the US has been able to make so much of its soft power. Soft power by itself is no guarantee of security. It is one arrow in a nation’s security quiver, not an all-purpose panacea.

So I have little patience for those who would naively suggest that soft power can solve all our security challenges. That is absurd: a jihadi who enjoys a Bollywood movie will still have no compunction about setting off a bomb in Mumbai, and the US has already learned that the perpetrators of 9/11 ate their last dinner at a MacDonald’s. To counter the terrorist threat there is no substitute for hard power. But there can be a complement to it. Where soft power works is in attracting enough goodwill from ordinary people to reduce the sources of support and succour that the terrorists enjoy, and without which they cannot function.

But this means we also need to solve our internal problems. We must ensure that we do enough to keep our people healthy, well-fed, and secure not just from terrorism but from the daily terror of poverty, hunger and ill-health. Progress is being made, but the benefits of record growth have not yet reached the third of our population still living below the poverty line – a poverty line drawn just this side of the funeral pyre. Until it does, our soft power will ring hollow, at home and abroad.

At the same time, if we want to be a source of attraction to others, it is not enough to attend to these basic needs. Our democracy, our thriving free media, our contentious NGOs, our energetic human rights groups, and the repeated spectacle of our remarkable general elections, have all made of India a rare example of the successful management of diversity in the developing world. But every time there is a Babri Masjid or a pogrom like the savagery in Gujarat in 2002, India suffers a huge setback to our soft power. Those who condoned the killings in Gujarat have done more damage to India’s national security than they can even begin to realize. If we want to fully use our soft power, India must preserve the precious pluralism that is such a civilizational asset in our globalizing world.