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The Indian elections are over. What is all this talk of Indian strategic power? Not so fast...

As an Indian, I have become a little concerned about the proliferation of those who speak of India as a future
world leader or even as the next superpower. The American publishers of my most recent book, The
Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, even added a gratuitous subtitle suggesting that my volume was about
the emerging 21st century power.
Now, I appreciate that this is not entirely unreasonable. Many thinkers and writers I respect have spoken of
Indias geostrategic advantages, its economic dynamism, political stability, proven military capabilities, its
nuclear, space and missile programs, the entrepreneurial energy of Indias people, and the countrys growing
pool of young and skilled manpower as assuring India great power status as a world leader in the new
century.
And yet I have a problem with that term. The notion of world leadership is a curiously archaic one. The very
phrase is redolent of Kipling ballads and James Bondian adventures. What makes a country a world leader? Is
it population, in which case India is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the worlds most populous
country by 2034? Is it military strength (Indias is already the worlds fourth-largest army) or nuclear capacity
(Indias status having been made clear in 1998, and last year formally recognized in the Indo-US nuclear deal)?
Is it economic development? There, India has made extraordinary strides in recent years; it is already the
worlds fifth-largest economy in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, and continues to climb, though too many
of our people still live destitute, amidst despair and disrepair. Or could it be a combination of all these, allied to
something altogether more difficult to define the soft power of its culture?
Much of the conventional analysis of Indias stature in the world relies on the all-too-familiar economic
assumptions. But we are famously a land of paradoxes, and one of those paradoxes is that so many speak
about India as a great power of the 21st century when we are not yet able to feed, educate and employ all our
people. So it is not economic growth, military strength or population numbers that I would underscore when I
think of Indias potential leadership role in the world of the 21st century. Rather, if there is one attribute of
independent India to which I think increasing attention should now be paid around the globe, it is the quality
which India is already displaying in ample measure today its soft power.

The notion of soft power is relatively new in international discourse. The term was coined by Harvards Joseph
Nye to describe the extraordinary strengths of the US that went well beyond American military dominance. Nye
argued that power is the ability to alter the behavior of others to get what you want, and there are three ways to
do that: coercion (sticks), payments (carrots) and attraction (soft power). If you are able to attract others, you
can economize on the sticks and carrots. Traditionally, power in world politics was seen in terms of military
power: the side with the larger army was likely to win. But even in the past, this was not enough: after all, the
US lost the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan, and the US discovered in its first few
years in Iraq the wisdom of Talleyrands adage that the one thing you cannot do with a bayonet is to sit on it.
Enter soft power both as an alternative to hard power, and as a complement to it. To quote Nye again: the
soft power of a country rests primarily on three resources: its culture (in places where it is attractive to others),
its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when they are seen as
legitimate and having moral authority).

I would go slightly beyond this: a countrys soft power, to me, emerges from the worlds perceptions of what that
country is all about. The associations and attitudes conjured up in the global imagination by the mere mention of
a countrys name is often a more accurate gauge of its soft power than a dispassionate analysis of its foreign
policies. In my view, hard power is exercised; soft power is evoked.
For Nye, the US is the archetypal exponent of soft power. The fact is that the US is the home of Boeing and
Intel, Google and the iPod, Microsoft and MTV, Hollywood and Disneyland, McDonalds and Starbucks in
short, of most of the major products that dominate daily life around our globe. The attractiveness of these
assets, and of the American lifestyle of which they are emblematic, is that they permit the US to persuade
others to adopt the agenda of the US, rather than it having to rely purely on the dissuasive or coercive hard
power of military force.
Of course, this can cut both ways. In a world of instant mass communications enabled by the Internet, countries
are increasingly judged by a global public fed on an incessant diet of web news, televised images, videos taken
on the cellphones of passers-by, and email gossip. The steep decline in Americas image and standing after
9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power: the Iraq invasion,
Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwaters killings of Iraqi civilians.
But this essay is not about the US. In his book, The Paradox of American Power, Nye took the analysis of soft
power beyond the US; other nations too, he suggested, could acquire it. In todays information era, he wrote,
three types of countries are likely to gain soft power and so succeed: Those whose dominant cultures and
ideals are closer to prevailing global norms (which now emphasize liberalism, pluralism, autonomy); those with
the most access to multiple channels of communication and thus more influence over how issues are framed;
and those whose credibility is enhanced by their domestic and international performance.
At first glance, this seems to be a prescription for reaffirming the contemporary reality of US dominance, since it
is clear that no country scores more highly on all three categories than the US. But Nye himself admits this is
not so: soft power has been pursued with success by other countries over the years. When France lost the war
of 1870 to Prussia, one of its most important steps to rebuild the nations shattered morale and enhance its
prestige was to create the Alliance Franaise 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 Camoes. Today, China has started establishing Confucius
Institutes to promote Chinese culture internationally, and the Beijing Olympics have been a sustained exercise
in the building up of soft power by an authoritarian state. The US itself has used officially sponsored initiatives,

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