Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century
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Spanish is, of course, not a factor in the noticeable warming in the bilateral relationship between India and (Portuguese-speaking) Brazil, each of which is the largest economy and most populous country in its region. The two countries have already expanded the scope of their bilateral dialogue to go well beyond trade issues alone, and there are hints that defence and security cooperation are also on the anvil. The former Brazilian president Lula de Silva visited India three times during his eight years in office, more than any other head of state. The creation of IBSA, referred to earlier, came out of the Brasília Declaration of 2003, which launched the India–Brazil–South Africa Dialogue Forum to promote enhanced trilateral cooperation on issues such as trade, investment, education, poverty reduction and the environment. All this did not, however, prevent the two countries from disagreeing with each other during the fraught WTO negotiations in 2008. South–South cooperation is all very well, but national interests must inevitably prevail.
As in Africa, comparisons with China are inevitable. The extraordinary increase in China’s trade with Latin America is the greatest bilateral spurt in any trade relationship in the world—an astonishing nineteenfold rise over the past decade, to a staggering $150 billion in 2010. That figure dwarfs India’s $20 billion, but it also gives rise to some disquiet in the LAC countries, which fear dependence on Chinese manufactured goods and the extractive (some would say exploitative) nature of China’s interest in the region, which (again unlike India’s) is largely government led and not private-sector driven. As to investment, as The Economist noted a few years ago, Chinese FDI in Latin America ‘has hitherto amounted to less than meets the eye’. That Indian companies have begun to make significant investments is welcomed by many who are hoping to see the South Asian country balance China’s impressive presence in the LAC, but it would again be idle to see the two in competition—not least because the two systems are different and India is never likely to match the Chinese government’s single-minded strategic drive abroad.
And yet the narrative of the last decade is sufficiently impressive to augur well for a significantly transformed relationship. The time has clearly come to look beyond the relatively modest figures for India–LAC trade (a little over $20 billion in 2010) or of Indian investments in the region (some $12 billion) to the direction of current and future trends. The current occasional (and relatively infrequent) visits of policy-makers have to be augmented in both directions, and the success of the handful of existing trade agreements needs to be built upon with systematic efforts to conclude similar agreements with more countries. It is time to take India–LAC ties to the next stage: institutionalizing regular contacts (from foreign office consultations to state visits), signing new trade agreements, offering more incentives to both the public and the private sectors, and putting more energy and vision into trade and investment promotion (for instance, offering governmental support to small and medium enterprises from one region to explore market access in the other). High-level policy dialogues on improving relations should not merely take place but, as Heine suggests, become part of the regular agenda of governments on both sides.
The India–LAC relationship could be the most interesting example of the transformation of the underdeveloped concept of South–South cooperation—from the rhetorical days when both regions advocated the statist concept of a new international economic order and clamoured for more resource transfers from the developed world to an era in which the indigenous private sectors of both have become powerhouses driving their growth and prosperity. In India, where rhetorical genuflections to socialism have persisted stubbornly for longer than in Latin America, the pursuit of the unexplored potential of the region should and will transform the Forgotten Continent into the Continent of Opportunity. That requires a vision and energy that I believe to be incipient but in need of encouragement from the highest levels in New Delhi.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Hard Challenge of Soft Power and Public Diplomacy
I am partially guilty for having introduced the idea of the importance of India’s ‘soft power’ into the public discourse of our country. My rationale for applying Joseph Nye’s ideas to India (initially in a series of speeches at the dawn of the new millennium) lay in the excessive international focus on the country’s rising power in conventional terms: our consistent economic growth in the last two decades has prompted too many to speak of India as a future ‘world leader’ or even as ‘the next superpower’. The American publishers of my 2007 book, The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone, even added a gratuitous subtitle suggesting that my volume was about ‘the emerging 21st century power’. (The Indian subtitle was the more modest ‘Reflections on India in the 21st Century’.) India, assorted foreign commentators claimed with a breathlessness that began to grate a few years ago, is heading irresistibly for ‘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 world’s most populous country by 2034, or even, in some recent estimates, 2026? Is it military strength (India’s is already the world’s fourth largest army) or nuclear capacity (India’s status having been made clear in 1998, and then 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 world’s fourth largest economy in PPP terms and continues to climb, being poised almost certainly to overtake Japan for the third spot in 2012, though too many of our people still live destitute, amid despair and disrepair. Or could it be a combination of all these, allied to something altogether more difficult to define—its ‘soft power’?
Many of the conventional analyses of India’s stature in the world rely on the all-too-familiar economic assumptions. But we are famously a land of paradoxes, and among those paradoxes is that so many speak about India as a great power of the twenty-first century when we are not yet able to feed, educate and employ all our people. So it’s not economic growth, military strength or population numbers that I would underscore when I think of India’s potential leadership role in the world of the twenty-first 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 Harvard’s Joseph Nye to describe the extraordinary strengths of the United States that went well beyond American military dominance. Nye argued that ‘power is the ability to alter the behaviour 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 economise 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 wasn’t enough: after all, the United States lost the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union was defeated in Afghanistan, and the United States discovered in its first few years in Iraq the wisdom of Talleyrand’s adage that the one thing you cannot do with a bayonet is 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 country’s soft power, to me, emerges from the world’s perceptions of what that country is all about. The associations and attitudes conjured up in the global imagination by the mere mention of a country’s name is often a more accura
te 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 United States is the archetypal exponent of soft power. The fact is that the United States is the home of Boeing and Intel, Google and the iPod, Microsoft and MTV, Hollywood and Disneyland, McDonald’s and Starbucks, Levi’s jeans and Coca-Cola—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 United States to persuade others to adopt the US agenda, rather than relying 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 Internet news, televised images, videos taken on the cellphones of passers-by, email gossip. The steep decline in America’s image and standing under the Bush Administration after 9/11 is a direct reflection of global distaste for the instruments of American hard power used by that government—Iraq invasion, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, rendition, Blackwater’s killings of Iraqi civilians.
The outpouring of goodwill for Washington in the wake of 9/11 (think of Le Monde’s famous assertion, ‘we are all Americans now’) and its squandering by America’s over-reliance on hard power in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the related ‘global war on terror’, are instructive. The existing soft power assets of the United States clearly proved inadequate to compensate for the deficiencies of its hard power approach: fans of American culture were not prepared to overlook the excesses of Guantánamo. Using Microsoft Windows does not predispose you in favour of extraordinary rendition. The misuse of hard power can undermine your soft power around the world.
But this discussion today is not about the United States. In his book The Paradox of American Power Nye took the analysis of soft power beyond the United States; other nations, too, he suggested, could acquire it. In today’s 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 United States. 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 nation’s shattered morale and enhance its prestige was to create the Alliance Française to promote French language and literature throughout the world. French culture has remained a major selling point for French diplomacy ever since. The United Kingdom 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. In recent years, China has started establishing ‘Confucius Institutes’ to promote Chinese culture internationally, and the Beijing Olympics were a sustained exercise in the building up of soft power by an authoritarian state. The United States itself has used officially sponsored initiatives, from the Voice of America to the Fulbright scholarships, to promote its soft power around the world. But soft power does not rely merely on governmental action: arguably, for the United States, Hollywood and MTV have done more to promote the idea of America as a desirable and admirable society than any US governmental endeavour. Soft power, in other words, is created partly by governments and partly despite governments; partly by deliberate action, partly by accident.
What does this mean for India? It means acknowledging that India’s claims to a significant leadership role in the world of the twenty-first century lie in the aspects and products of Indian society and culture that the world finds attractive. These assets may not directly persuade others to support India, but they go a long way towards enhancing India’s intangible standing in the world’s eyes.
The roots of India’s soft power run deep. India’s is a civilization that, over millennia, has offered refuge and, more important, religious and cultural freedom to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims. Jews came to the south-western Indian coast centuries before Christ, with the destruction by the Babylonians of their First Temple, and they knew no persecution on Indian soil until the Portuguese arrived in the sixteenth century to inflict it. Christianity arrived on Indian soil with St Thomas the Apostle (‘Doubting Thomas’), who came to the Malabar coast sometime before 52 CE and was welcomed on shore, or so oral legend has it, by a flute-playing Jewish girl. He made many converts, so there are Indians today whose ancestors were Christian well before any Europeans discovered Christianity. In Kerala, where Islam came through traders, travellers and missionaries rather than by the sword, and which boasts the oldest mosque, church and synagogue on the subcontinent, the Zamorin of Calicut was so impressed by the seafaring skills of this community that he issued a decree obliging each fisherman’s family to bring up one son as a Muslim to man his all-Muslim navy! The India where the wail of the Muslim muezzin routinely blends with the chant of mantras at the Hindu temple, and where the tinkling of church bells accompanies the Sikh gurdwara’s reading of verses from the Guru Granth Sahib, is an India that fully embraces the world. Indeed the British historian E.P. Thompson wrote that this heritage of diversity is what makes India ‘perhaps the most important country for the future of the world. All the convergent influences of the world run through this society …. There is not a thought that is being thought in the West or East that is not active in some Indian mind.’
That Indian mind has been shaped by remarkably diverse forces: ancient Hindu tradition, myth and scripture; the impact of Islam and Christianity; and two centuries of British colonial rule. The result is unique. Though there are some who think and speak of India as a Hindu country, Indian civilization today is an evolved hybrid. We cannot speak of Indian culture today without qawwali, the poetry of Ghalib, or for that matter the game of cricket, our de facto national sport. When an Indian dons ‘national dress’ for a formal event, he wears a variant of the sherwani, which did not exist before the Muslim invasions of India. When Indian Hindus voted a few years ago in a cynical and contrived competition to select the ‘new seven wonders’ of the modern world, they voted for the Taj Mahal constructed by a Mughal king, not for Angkor Wat, the most magnificent architectural product of their religion. In the breadth (and not just the depth) of its cultural heritage lies some of India’s soft power.
One of the few generalizations that can safely be made about India is that nothing can be taken for granted about the country. Not even its name: for the word India comes from the river Indus, which flows in Pakistan. (That anomaly is easily explained, of course, since what is today Pakistan was hacked off the stooped shoulders of India by the departing British in 1947.) Indian nationalism is therefore a rare phenomenon indeed. It is not based on language (since our Constitution recognizes twenty-three and there are thirty-five, according to the ethnolinguists, that are spoken by more than a million people each—not to mention 22,000 distinct dialects). It is not based on geography (the ‘natural’ geography of the subcontinent—framed by the mountains and the sea—has been hacked by the Partition of 1947). It is not based on ethnicity (the ‘Indian’ accommodates a diversity of racial types, and many Indians have more in common ethnically with foreigners than with other Indians: Indian Punjabis and Bengalis, for instance, are ethnically kin to Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, respectively, with whom they have more in common than with Poonawalas or Bangaloreans). And it is not based on religion (we are home to every faith known to mankind, wi
th the possible exception of Shintoism, and Hinduism—a faith without a national organization, no established church or ecclesiastical hierarchy, no Hindu Pope, no Hindu Mecca, no single sacred book, no uniform beliefs or modes of worship, not even a Hindu Sunday—exemplifies as much our diversity as it does our common cultural heritage). Indian nationalism is the nationalism of an idea, the idea of an ever-ever land—emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history, sustained by pluralist democracy. Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the very nature of the country; it is a choice made inevitable by India’s geography and reaffirmed by its history.
We are a land of rich diversities: I have observed in the past that we are all minorities in India. This land imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing. You can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite and a good Indian all at once. So the idea of India is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, culture, cuisine, conviction, costume and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus. That consensus is around the simple principle that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree—except on the ground rules of how you will disagree. Part of the reason for India’s being respected in the world is that it has survived all the stresses and strains that have beset it, and that led so many to predict its imminent disintegration, by maintaining consensus on how to manage without consensus.