India’s Soft Power and Cultural Diplomacy

In modern era, India’s journey to leverage its soft power capital, which had begun influencing its interactions with foreign states and societies even during the colonisation phase. Intellectual and radical interactions of luminaries like Swami Vivekananda, Tagore, MN Roy signalled an intrepid internationalism in their minds. To quote Gandhi, “I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any”. As one of the few uninterrupted surviving civilisations, with its unique values and worldview, India offered new meanings to concepts like war, peace, power, religion, and similar others.

The post-independence Indian approach became too aligned with this moralist and non-realist (as some scholars argue) in its quest to be non-aligned. However, the Cold War realities and precarious security and economic situations on the domestic front forced it into Soviet embrace. This is where our first attempt to harness our soft power began when we exported the charisma of Raj Kapoor and Nargis. Long before Nye formally conceptualised soft power, Joseph Nye as the ability almost akin to persuasion, of a state to co-opt peer states to its own choices, India under Nehru had steered clear of hard power politics.

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References

1) Malone, D. M. (2011). Soft Power in Indian Foreign Policy. Economic and Political Weekly , 46 (36), 35-36.

2) Kodithuwakku, K. (2015). Soft Power as a Tool in Indian Foreign Policy. 8th International Research Conference. Colombo: KDU.

3) Nye, J. S. (1990). Soft Power. Foreign Affairs (80), 153-177.

About the Author

Rishya Dharmani is a geopolitical intelligence analyst at the Global Eye Intelligence. She is also a ‘Research Fellow’ at the International Council on Human Rights, Peace and Politics. She completed Bachelor of Arts (Political Science) at Lady Shri Ram College for Women and Master’s degree (Political Science) at the Indra Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). She is currently pursuing Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at the Panjab University.

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