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India Between “Soft State” and “Soft Power”

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Jacques E. C. Hymans
01/19/2010
“India’s problem is that we have never imposed a price on any nation for action taken against us,” former Deputy National Security Adviser Satish Chandra said back in September. “We keep silent and accept whatever comes our way.” Chandra is echoing a feeling that is widespread among the Indian elite and even general public. Many Indians believe that the country’s external enemies, rivals and friends alike perceive India to be a pushover, or to quote Chandra again, a “soft state.” In addition – and even more to the point – many Indians themselves hold the same perception.

In 1960 – or even as late as 1990 – Chandra’s assessment of India’s international image might have been pretty accurate, albeit not the part about Indians “keeping silent.” Up until the end of the Cold War, many foreign policy elites in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere held the negative stereotype of India as a “soft state,” meaning a state that is too legalistic and naïve to be taken seriously by the tough-minded realists who sit at the world’s high table.

But two decades have passed since the end of the Cold War, and what might have been an accurate analysis of India’s image in 1990 no longer holds true in 2010. On one level, the international community has certainly noticed that over the past decade-plus, India’s foreign policy emphases changed dramatically: out went the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and in came Davos. But on a deeper level, the international community itself has changed its foreign policy emphases. States around the world today – including even the U.S., in the wake of the disastrous Bush/Cheney experiment – no longer equate “softness” with “weakness” or “hardness” with “strength.” Instead, they are actively seeking to amass what Professor Joseph Nye has aptly dubbed soft power.

Thus, the principal challenge for India’s “national brand managers” today is not how to overcome the country’s traditional “softness,” as Chandra believes, but rather how to avoid overcorrecting away from it.

What is Soft Power?

Power is the ability to make others do what you want, when they would not otherwise have done so. There are two basic forms of power: hard and soft. The distinction between these two rests not on their relative brutality, but rather on their relative materiality. The ability to offer economic inducements is just as “hard” a form of power as the ability to threaten destruction. By contrast, “soft” power is based on intangibles: i.e., less on what you own, and more on what you represent. In other words, soft power is the ability to make others do what you want because of how they see you. The soft power of states is akin to the power of movie stars to endorse a certain brand of soap or fried chicken. There is also a flip side of soft power, which I dub “soft vulnerability.” Soft vulnerability is the fate of seeing others do what you don’t want because of how they see you. The soft vulnerability of states is akin to the vulnerability of movie stars to the paparazzi.

The relationship between hard and soft power and vulnerability is not straightforward. As a state’s hard power goes up, sometimes its soft power will rise as well. But quite often, just the opposite occurs. Consider, for instance, the fate of Germany in the years leading up to World War I. The more hard power Germany amassed, the more its neighbors started to find faults with the German political and economic system, and even with the German character. In short, Germany’s military buildup produced great soft vulnerability, leading ultimately to military vulnerability.

India’s Unstable Soft Power

Since the late 1990s, India has enjoyed the happy situation of seeing its hard and soft power rise remarkably fast and in tandem, at least from the vantage point of Washington, D.C. India’s newfound hard power is based on its growing economic and military assets. Meanwhile, its soft power is based on four basic images:

Bollywood: India’s diverse contributions to our globalized contemporary cultural life.
The Bomb: India’s new reputation as a tough-minded, muscular player in geopolitics.
Bangalore: India’s new reputation for excellence in the worlds of business and technology.
The Boy Next Door: The growth and increasing visibility of the Indian-American “model minority.”

Many would also cite the fifth image of India’s standing as the “world’s largest democracy.” But the sad fact is that Washington does not adore democracy nearly as much as its rhetoric would imply. Although Indian democracy has been a constant, India began to gain significant soft power with American foreign policy elites only a few years ago. Before that, Washington generally treated democratic India with indifference or even contempt.

The boom in Indian soft power has been very impressive. But India’s new, positive image remains only weakly entrenched in the American consciousness. Hovering just below the new image are older, pejorative images of India and Indians. For example, in addition to the image of Indians as soft weaklings, there is also the image of Indians as savage beasts that has an equally long pedigree in Western culture.

If India were to independently assert its newfound military power for purposes not strictly construable as acts of self-defense, it would likely cause many Americans – whether they realize it today or not – to bring the old savage beast stereotype out of mothballs. As a result, Washington would become much less keen on gaining a strategic partnership with New Delhi. Perhaps understanding this, terrorists have repeatedly tried to bait India into overreaction with their attacks on highly symbolic sites like the Indian parliament building in 2001 and the Taj hotel in Mumbai in 2008. So far, India has refused to take the terrorists’ bait, but for how much longer?

Achieving and Sustaining Soft Power: A How-To Guide

The pursuit of soft power is a difficult challenge for policymakers not only in New Delhi, but all over the world. The best guide for seeking soft power amidst the treacherous shoals of international opinion can be found in the work of the British poet, Rudyard Kipling. In his famous poem “If” and other writings, Kipling described the basic behaviors that constitute proper “manliness,” as opposed to childish timidity on the one hand, or savage violence on the other. Maintaining an image of proper manliness is the essence of soft power in the international system today, just as it was in Kipling’s day.

If India can continue to hew as closely to Kipling’s rules of proper manliness as it has done over the past decade, it will retain and even increase the soft power it has achieved in Washington’s eyes. But if not, its new, positive image will dissipate even more quickly than it was won. And if India’s stock of soft power does start to decline, complaining about American double standards – justifiable as those complaints may be – will simply end up reviving the old stereotype of whining Indians that recent governments in New Delhi have worked so hard to overcome.

There is certainly more than a tinge of irony in the notion that Indians should go back and read Kipling, the bard of the British Empire. But after all, India has definitively decided to play the same international power game that produced the British Empire.Kipling may not have written the rules of that game, but he gave voice to them more eloquently than anyone else before or since. So, read Kipling—but while you are doing so, try also not to forget that India’s freedom struggle generation wanted their sons and daughters to study at the feet of a different master.

Jacques E. C. Hymans is Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California. His publications include “India’s Soft Power and Vulnerability,” in India Review Vol. 8, No. 3 (August 2009) and The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation: Identity, Emotions, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2006), which won two major book awards.

http://casi.ssc.upenn.edu/iit/hymans
 
we should combine soft power and hard power to attain global importance.

but we need hard power let there be no doubt about it.
 
The meteoric rise of both India and China must have become the most discussed geopolitical trend of the past decade. And now, at a time when most economies are still floundering in the wake of the global economic crisis and both Asian states project almost insolent growth rates of 7 to 8 % for the
The meteoric rise of both India and China must have become the most discussed geopolitical trend of the past decade. And now, at a time when most economies are still floundering in the wake of the global economic crisis and both Asian states project almost insolent growth rates of 7 to 8 % for the
coming fiscal year; at a time when a steady stream of media reports indicate an upsurge in Sino-Indian border tensions along the Himalayas, it appears ever more obvious that the XXIst century will be increasingly defined not only by how Delhi and Beijing interact with the rest of the world, but also by how they choose to interact with each other.

All too often, India and China are somewhat summarily lumped together as Asia’s “rising powers”. In reality, however, India and China are at two very different stages in their development and are quite simply not yet boxing in the same category. In terms of pure hard, conventional military power, China is leagues ahead of its transhimalayan neighbor. This is due, in no small part to the fact that India’s steadily growing military budget, which accounted for 26.8 billion dollars in 2008-2009, is still nowhere near that of the PRC, which some Pentagon analysts estimate to be close to 140 billion dollars.
(China is notoriously opaque when it comes to the detailing of its military budget) Diplomatically speaking, China is a permanent member of the UNSC, India, despite all its lobbying in favor of a reform of the Security Council, is not. Finally, in terms of economic power, China which reaps the rewards of a 20 years head start over India in the domain of economic liberalization, can boast a GDP, which, at 4.2 trillion dollars, is about three times and a half that of India (1.2 trillion dollars).


current indian GDP - 1.7 trillion dollars

courtesy > IND 151


There is however one area where the playing field is more level: Soft Power.
Soft power is frequently simply conflated with economic power. If that was the case, Beijing would once again be far ahead. In reality though, as Joseph Nye famously pointed out, a nation’s soft power is far more than a simple panorama of its achievements in terms of exports, FTAs and sustained growth rates. Soft power, he says, is “the influence and attractiveness a nation acquires when others are drawn to its culture and ideas.” In the information world we live in, the “image branding” of nations, as well as their “likeability factor” have acquired greater significance, especially so for two states that are not only countries, but also civilizational states struggling to let the rest of the world come to terms with their relatively recent rise.

While both states are acutely aware of the importance of soft power and cultural attractivity, India seems to hold a sizeable advantage in that, unlike China, it needs to do little to render its culture appealing to the rest of the world. The process is natural, almost organic. This is consistent with India’s long history as both a birthplace of ideas, and of peaceful cultural diffusion. Whereas China invaded and occupied Vietnam for more than a thousand years, India spread Buddhism and the Hindu concept of sacred kingship to Southeast Asia not by sword and flame, but via trade and itinerant missionaries. The fact that ancient India never engaged in long-term occupation or widespread forcible conversion in Southeast Asia is not without significance. The peaceful propagation of Buddhism is a multi-millennia old bond that India shares with the rest of the Asian continent that acts as a testament to the power of its civilizational pull. In stark contrast, Chinese Confucianism, deemed too elitist and Sino-centric, was only adopted by certain other countries’ leading classes (as in Vietnam) but never by their peasantry.



When it comes to defining India’s more modern ‘soft power’ Bollywood is often cited, and with reason, as a prime example. The glittering, flamboyant films churned out by Mumbai’s gargantuan film industry have long been popular in certain regions of the world such as the Middle East. Over the past decade, however, Bollywood has been making inroads elsewhere. One of the most popular current viral videos in India shows a man in the depths of Tajikistan passionately humming and singing a Bollywood theme song to his bemused Indian visitors-all in perfectly memorized Hindi. When the Indian TV soap opera ‘Kynunki Saas Bhi’ was dubbed in Dari and aired on Afghanistan’s Tolo TV it was such an astounding success that it became a national obsession. 90% of television-owning Afghan families would follow the show, sometimes incurring the wrath of mullahs who viewed it as being responsible for the desertion of mosques during evening prayers. In certain African countries, such as Senegal and Mali, villagers often trek out miles to the closest projection room just to be able to watch one of the latest Bollywood films. Little does it matter that they do not understand the dialogue or that it is set in a distant land; the themes of love, family and marriage they evoke are universal, and the sparkling opulence of the dances, costumes and songs have the gift of enchanting the minds of moviegoers far less jaded than those in the West.


(An Arab Cable TV advert advertising Bollywood films)

India’s cultural influence is not only being felt in the developing world, however. Books by Indian English-speaking writers such as Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh and Arundhati Roy have wooed critics across the world and become instant modern classics. Films by progressive female Indian directors such as Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta have revealed that Indian films are more than escapist fantasies, and can be simultaneously contemplative and entertaining. The triumph of Slumdog Millionnaire at last year’s Academy Awards was not only that of a slick, elegantly crafted melodrama, but also that of a certain depiction of contemporary India, warts and all, which nevertheless swayed the hearts of the jury.



This positive image of India is actively reinforced in the West by the increasingly affluent and politically self-confident Indian diaspora. This is particularly the case in the US, where families of Indian origin earn on average twice as much as their standard American counterparts, and where the Indian business lobby has gained such political clout that Hillary Clinton was derisively nicknamed the ‘Senator from Punjab’ during the 2008 election. In contrast, Chinese overseas communities, traditionally wealthy in Southeast Asia, do not fare as well in the West. While the average revenue of a Chinese American family is above that of their White American counterparts, the Chinese community registers very strong income disparities, and its members tend to be overqualified for their jobs. They also have not, as yet, manifested the same political activism in Congress as their South Asian counterparts.
In Great Britain, curry has now replaced fish and chips as the national dish of choice, and it is said that curry houses in the UK now employ more people than the mining and shipbuilding industries combined. Mumbai has now become one of the fashion capitals of the world, and fashion aficionados of the world no longer only stalk the runways of Milan, Paris and New York.

All this seems to indicate that the flow of information in-between India and the world is no longer unidirectional, as in the past, when India would only attract pampered Western youths trawling the subcontinent in search of a hypothetical spiritual redemption. India is gradually regaining its place as a historical trendsetter, and the influence it is having on the rest of the world, and particularly on the West, is far more profound and extends beyond simple pop subculture.



What now of China? As the perfectly choreographed spectacles of the 2008 Olympics and the recent 60th anniversary of the PLA seem to display, no other country in the world devotes as much time and energy into projecting a positive image as China. Why then, does it not seem to be catching on?
Part of the reason may be that China’s cultural diplomacy, unlike India’s, is more didactic than dialectic, and focuses more on an officially sanctioned discourse than on an open exchange of ideas. Take China’s growing global network of Confucius Institutes, which are designed to provide instruction in Chinese language and culture, and which work to create partnerships in-between Chinese universities and foreign universities in their host countries. The Institutes also operate under the tutelage of the ‘Chinese Language Council’ a government body, which has issued strict guidelines stipulating that the Institutes, as well as their host universities, must comply with political directives on issues deemed by Beijing to be ‘sensitive’, such as the international status of Taiwan or Tibet, or any form of historical investigation pertaining to ethnic minorities.

All in all, Chinese public diplomacy has been highly selective in nature. If cultural diplomacy is, as some have claimed, a form of ‘elaborate storytelling to the world’, then China is only telling half the story. One interesting case study is that of the famous mariner Zheng He who plied the waters of the South China Sea and of the Indian Ocean, and maybe even beyond with a fleet of 28 000 men, and who is now being held up as an emblem of China’s great seafaring past, as well as a symbol of the PRC’s supposedly peaceful maritime intent. Conveniently left out of the historically sanctioned narrative is the fact that Zheng He’s expeditions, were not only economic and pacifist in nature, as it is claimed, but were also a political extension of the Imperial tributary system. When a ruler, such as the Sri Lankan king Alakeswara, refused to pay tribute and thus recognize himself as the Chinese Emperor’s vassal, he was promptly deposed and ferried back to the Ming Court in chains. (Another fact that is frequently glossed over is that Zheng He was a Hui Muslim, and could probably never have risen to such preeminence in today’s Han dominated China)
Even Chinese international blockbusters, such as ‘Hero’ or ‘House of Flying Daggers’, while entertaining and often beautifully shot, invariably deal with a recurring theme: the photogenic and ethnically Han heroes, battling through pristine landscapes, end up by sacrificing themselves for the good of the nation. This may explain why such films, which have known some success in Western movie theatres, leave audiences in the developing world cold. An African villager or Central Asian goat tender has little time for the lofty ideal of national self-preservation in the face of fissiparous tendencies. He wants to watch something he can relate to, and whistle a catchy tune on his way home.



The main reason underlying India’s Soft Power Advantage over China, however, is undoubtedly related to the nature of their respective regimes and societies. India’s tradition of tolerance for diversity and of religious syncretism, when combined with its pluralist democratic system, vibrant mass media, and English-speaking elite, render it an infinitely more inspiring model. China’s slightly Orwellian PR efforts cannot hide the deeply unattractive nature of its regime. Its soothing discourses on its harmonious society collapse in on themselves each time a blood-soaked repression of Tibetan or Uighur protestors is caught on film, and its insistence on its peaceful rise is put into doubt when reports surface of Chinese warships harassing US vessels in international waters. Beijing’s habit of nurturing close ties with unsavory regimes such as Sudan, Myanmar and North Korea does little to improve matters. Indeed, while China’s non-interference policy in the domestic affairs of human right trampling states may earn it some degree of appreciation abroad, of a state respectful of national sovereignty; it only adds to its image, particularly in democratic societies, of an unscrupulous, amoralistic entity.

This is something that China, for all its flawlessly orchestrated displays and declarations of good intent, is powerless to prevent. India, for its part, is far from perfect. Its relations with its neighbors in South Asia, who tend to view it as a regional bully, are deplorable, and in its quest for energy security and its need to hedge against either Pakistan or China it has been forced to cozy up to some pretty shady regimes as well, thus running the risk in the long term of casting a shadow over its shiny democratic visage. The Bollywood films that have elicited such an enthusiastic response abroad showcase all too often a clean, pale-skinned bourgeois India disconnected from everyday reality. But as far as Rising Asia’s PR war is concerned, for India the battle is already won.





India and the world: India's Soft Power Advantage.
 
Nice article but it's flawed.

Soft state - A state which is not too aggressive in their foreign policy.

Soft power - Bollywood, Yoga, Indian cuisine, clothes, India's image in the world.

I don't see any correlation between them. :)
 
Well India is a soft state. Not a soft power in half the way it is a soft state. It is soft on terror, soft on retaliation, soft in foreign policy goof-ups, soft in domestic policy goof-ups etc.
 
India may be able to influence common people in many corners of the world but what really matters is influencing the opinions of those in power. China is well poised as far as the above case is concerned.
 
India may be able to influence common people in many corners of the world but what really matters is influencing the opinions of those in power. China is well poised as far as the above case is concerned.

the article says same
 
Well India is a soft state. Not a soft power in half the way it is a soft state. It is soft on terror, soft on retaliation, soft in foreign policy goof-ups, soft in domestic policy goof-ups etc.

not completely correct.

Russia sold RD 93 and not RD 33 MK to Pakistan.

obvious reason is Russia didn't want to make India its biggest consumer unhappy.

if you dont believe me read article again.
 
not completely correct.

Russia sold RD 93 and not RD 33 MK to Pakistan.

obvious reason is Russia didn't want to make India its biggest consumer unhappy.

if you dont believe me read article again.

Yeah? What about the military screwups that it has been doing since last 4 years that is not reported by media or partially reported? The shootouts? The killings? The incursions? The enemies' assertions? The trade gaffs? The response to terrorist attacks inside Indian territory?

What does all this qualify India as? Not even a soft state but a WEAK state with the present form of governance. Face it; this is reality. I am saying this with a pinch of pepper myself.

Russia not selling was their own prioritization because they don't want to annoy their largest customer. What about from our side? NOTHING.
 
Yeah? What about the military screwups that it has been doing since last 4 years that is not reported by media or partially reported? The shootouts? The killings? The incursions? The enemies' assertions? The trade gaffs? The response to terrorist attacks inside Indian territory?

What does all this qualify India as? Not even a soft state but a WEAK state with the present form of governance. Face it; this is reality. I am saying this with a pinch of pepper myself.

Russia not selling was their own prioritization because they don't want to annoy their largest customer. What about from our side? NOTHING.

dont forget US pressurized india in 80s and 90s to not to take any action against Pakistan.
 
By the way the Govt handled Anna Hazare I can say:

India is hard on its peace loving citizens but soft on the trouble making foreigners.
 
dont forget US pressurized india in 80s and 90s to not to take any action against Pakistan.

And we bought the pressure. See US can pressurize UPA to even buy 1980 F-16s. Does that mean we will buy them? No. It is all a matter of will and intent. We are not a country that can be easily pressurized. This was simply because UPA doesn't have the nuts to face and fight against the national threat. Face it; this is the truth.
 

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