The pitfalls of using social media are the ever-present risk that something said on a social network could itself be taken out of context or misused by our critics. Responses to questions are particularly vulnerable to being issued in haste and without the usual careful vetting that more formal statements undergo. The nature of the medium calls for speedy issuance of information and instant reaction, neither of which government processes are designed for. India was excoriated on the Internet for having failed to issue a reaction to bomb blasts in Mumbai’s Jhaveri Bazaar in 2011 before the Pakistani foreign office did so, even though the tragedy had taken place on Indian soil. MEA officials were, however, unrepentant, pointing out that it is precisely because the events took place in India that New Delhi had a greater responsibility to measure its words.
Such challenges persist. Social media is a tool for disseminating a message, not one for making policy. When the policy is not ready, the message will inevitably lag. But the existence of social media should prompt the injection of a new urgency into the government’s traditional ways of doing business.
Of course, the MEA is not alone in using social media to reach out to the public. The Delhi Police has a Facebook page, India Post helps people track parcels through Twitter, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and the Pune city council provide information on garbage disposal, the Census authorities have an extensive Internet presence. For domestic ministries, the use of social media both provides useful public information (as the Twitter sites of the Delhi Police and the Indian Post Office attest) and adds to the sense of public accountability that is invaluable in a democracy.
The principal lesson of this experience is that it works, provided you are willing to make the effort required. And that means having a team in place to deal with all the questions, comments and complaints that come your way, because a non-responsive social media site could be seriously counter-productive. As the Indian blogger Mahima Kaul wrote, ‘If you are not in it, you are out of it.’ This young lady puts it well when she says that the Indian government ‘will have to trust its people, and it will have to trust its own ability to respond to the people’.
There is no good reason why an IT powerhouse like India should not be in the forefront of public diplomacy efforts using twenty-first-century technologies and communications practices. Not to deploy social media tools effectively is to abdicate a channel of contact not only with the millions of young Indians who use Facebook, Twitter and Orkut, but also to the huge Indian diaspora that tends to have such an active presence on the Net on Indian issues and in turn wields a disproportionate influence on international perceptions of India. To place matters in perspective, Facebook alone currently has over 500 million subscribers, 50 per cent of whom access the site on any given day, and a unique ability to disseminate information virally among its system and beyond through its networks of friends, fans and those who share their information. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, and each of those has 130 more, and so on. When President Obama delivered his famous Africa address in Ghana, the state department deployed a full range of digital tools and some 250,000 Africans posed questions or made comments on the address—and most received responses from dedicated staff assigned to respond!
My own experience with Twitter has had its positive and negatives, but in my view the positives outweigh the negatives. It is an extraordinary interactive broadcast medium—an interactive Akashvani. With one message today, I can reach more than 1.3 million people, and that number keeps expanding every day. As I discovered during my time in government, I can also use it to put out information the mainstream media may not be interested in. My visit to Liberia, for example, was the first ministerial visit in thirty-eight years. It was ignored in India by the media, but through my updates and a couple of links I posted, India’s Africa diplomacy got more widely known because of Twitter. A similar phenomenon occurred when I interrupted a tour of Latin America to travel to Haiti after its tragic earthquake in early 2010, becoming both the first Indian minister to set foot in that country ever and also one of the first foreign officials to express solidarity with the victims of that disaster. Once again, the Indian media’s lack of interest in world affairs meant that the visit went unreported in India but for my Twitter updates from the spot.
I believe that during my ten months in government, I was able to use social media to demystify governance and sensitize people to the daily life of a minister. And after leaving office I have been able to expand my conversation with politically engaged people around the globe. Of course, I haven’t shared any sensitive information from any political or government meetings on Twitter, but politicians all over the world are tweeting. President Obama has millions of ‘followers’ on Twitter and Hillary Clinton was tweeting eight to ten times a day when she was on an official visit to India. The UK government encourages frequent use of Twitter and even issues guidelines on effective tweeting. The former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd and Canada’s ex-leader of the Opposition Michael Ignatieff tweet regularly. A whole slew of foreign ministers—Rudd himself, Norway’s Jonas Store, Bahrain’s Khalid al-Khalifa (who did so, he declared, inspired by me) and many others—are regular tweeters.
In my view, a democratic politician should not resist a new communications medium. The name Twitter initially put me off, and has led people to suggest that it is not a suitable medium for a serious politician—the BJP’s Venkaiah Naidu even presciently warned me that ‘too much tweeting can lead to quitting’. But I suppose his colleagues have, like me, come to realize that Google and Yahoo were also silly names that are now household terms. I am convinced that a large number of politicians in twenty-first-century democracies—including India—will be tweeting within ten years from now. Those who are ahead of the curve are rarely appreciated.
Twitter is only a vehicle—the message is the issue, not the medium. I believe that the Government of India should understand that using social media brings into the government’s ambit a large number of people who would otherwise be indifferent to India’s diplomacy. We just need to take care to ensure that the message is not misunderstood, without becoming so anodyne as to not attract an audience. The idea has always been to inform and engage, rather than to merely issue press releases.
Social media is also critical for connecting the world’s younger generation on a single platform, thus strengthening bonds between them across borders and cultures. Young people from different geographic and economic backgrounds can be brought together in a positive direction. Students who attended the India-Pakistan Youth Peace Conferences have started using digital media to stay connected and have even invited others from their campuses to join the conversations.
But there is a long way to go, and it would be idle to pretend there isn’t resistance, both from traditionalists and on grounds of security risks. But we can be encouraged, perhaps, by the fact that the practice is spreading, and that governmental organizations have started to make full use of the possibilities offered by the new social media tools. They are receiving a positive response to such initiatives. Whatever traditionalists might say, the same logic does apply to India’s external affairs. The government just needs to recognize that social media is here to stay, and we need to live with it. Quite simply, we will not be able to live without it.
So much for what public diplomacy is, why it is needed and how it can be deployed. The one issue that remains, though, is the substance of the message. A bad decision or a weak policy can rarely be salvaged by good public diplomacy alone. ‘Incredible India!’ is a great campaign for the department of tourism, but in public diplomacy what you need is Credible India. There is a need for a positive and forward-looking strategy that projects a vision of India in the world, that helps define and shape what is increasingly being called—in the new buzzword these days about our country—‘Brand India’. It’s an idea, says the subtitle of a recent book, whose time has come. There’s already a foundation to Brand India, and the phrase trips lightly off the ton
gues of assorted pontificators.
But what is that idea? What, for that matter, is Brand India? A brand, the marketing gurus tell us, is a symbol embodying all the key information about a product or a service: it could be a name, a slogan, a logo, a graphic design. When the brand is mentioned, it carries with it a whole series of associations in the public mind, as well as expectations of how it will perform. The brand can be built up by skilful advertising, so that certain phrases or moods pop up the moment one thinks of the brand; but ultimately the only real guarantee of the brand’s continued worth is the actual performance of the product or service it stands for. If the brand delivers what it promises, it becomes a great asset in itself. Properly managed, the brand can increase the perceived value of a product or service in the eyes of the consumer. Badly managed, a tarnished brand can undermine the product itself.
So can India be a brand? A country isn’t a soft drink or a cigarette, but its very name can conjure up certain associations in the minds of others. This is why our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, insisted on retaining the name ‘India’ for the newly independent country, in the face of resistance from nativists who wanted it renamed ‘Bharat’. ‘India’ had a number of associations in the eyes of the world: it was a fabled and exotic land, much sought after by travellers and traders for centuries, the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Her Britannic Majesty Victoria, whose proudest title was that of ‘Empress of India’. Nehru wanted people to understand that the India he was leading was heir to that precious heritage. He wanted, in other words, to hold on to the brand.
For a while, it worked. India retained its exoticism, its bejewelled maharajas and caparisoned elephants cavorting before the fabled Taj Mahal, while simultaneously striding the world stage as a moral force for peace and justice in the vein of Mahatma Gandhi. But it couldn’t last. As poverty and famine stalked the land, and the exotic images became replaced in the global media with pictures of suffering and despair, the brand became soiled. It stood, in many people’s eyes, for a mendicant with a begging bowl, a hungry and skeletal child by his side. It was no longer a brand that could attract the world.
Today, the brand is changing again. As India transforms itself economically from a lumbering elephant to a bounding tiger, it needs a fresh brand image to keep up with the times. The government even set up, with the collaboration of the Confederation of Indian Industry, an India Brand Equity Foundation. They were tasked with coming up with a slogan that encapsulated the new brand in time for the World Economic Forum’s 2006 session in Davos, where India was guest of honour. They did. ‘India: Fastest-growing free market democracy’ was emblazoned all over the Swiss resort. Brand India was born.
But though it’s a great slogan, is it enough? Coca-Cola, for years, offered the ‘pause that refreshes’: it told you all that you needed to know about the product. Does ‘fastest-growing free market democracy’ do the same? India’s rapid economic growth is worth drawing attention to, as is the fact that it’s a free market (we want foreigners to invest, after all) and a democracy (that’s what distinguishes us from that other place over there, which for years has grown faster than us). But isn’t there more to us than that?
In fairness to the smart people who coined the phrase, the more attributes you try to get in, the clunkier and less memorable the phrase becomes. It’s easier for smaller countries that aim for one-issue branding. Regions of ancient India enjoyed branding before the term was coined—the ‘Spice Coast’, for example, for the stretches of Kerala to which European and Arab traders came, looking for pepper and cloves; or the ‘Silk Route’ passing through manufacturing and trading centres of silk across northern India. Such terms highlight the importance of getting the basics right, so the brand encapsulates what you want to be your core appeal to outsiders. What do we want the world to think of when they hear the name ‘India’? Clearly we’d prefer ‘fastest-growing free market democracy’ to replace the old images of despair and disrepair. But surely there are other elements we want to build into the brand: the exquisite natural beauty of much of our country, encapsulated in the ‘Incredible India!’ advertising campaign conducted by the tourism department; the glitz and glamour of Bollywood and Indian fashion and jewellery designs; the unparalleled diversity of our plural society, with people of every conceivable religious, linguistic and ethnic extraction living side by side in harmony; and the richness of our cultural heritage, to name just four obvious examples. Yet it would be impossible to fit all that into a poster, a banner or even a TV commercial. (And we’d still have left out a host of essentials, from Ayurveda to IT.)
The NDA government led by the BJP tried out a different kind of branding in the 2004 elections with the slogan ‘India Shining’. The question that inevitably arose was: who was India shining for? Those who felt that the still-incomplete transformation of India had not brought lustre into their lives were quick to react adversely to the slogan. The NDA lost the election, and the slogan was quietly buried. Good advertising copy cannot make a brand by itself; it must speak to a reality that everyone recognizes.
The importance of Brand India lies in the fact that India’s claims to a significant 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. As I have already argued, our strength lies in our soft power, which lends itself more easily to the information era. Soft power is not about conquering others, but about being yourself. A country’s brand is judged by the soft power elements it projects on to the global consciousness, either deliberately (through the export of cultural products, the cultivation of foreign publics or even international propaganda) or unwittingly (through the ways in which it’s perceived as a result of news stories in the global mass media). National brands, in other words, are not merely created by governments; they emerge from a variety of sources, conscious and unconscious, planned and unplanned. Branding isn’t just what we can deliberately and consciously put on display; it’s rather how others see what we are. With many of the examples I have provided earlier in this chapter, we weren’t trying to impress the world, but the world said ‘wow—that’s India’. There’s your branding.
As I have argued, in the information age, it’s not the side with the bigger army, but the one with the better story, that wins. India must remain the ‘land of the better story’. To be a source of attraction to others, it must preserve the democratic pluralism that is such a civilizational asset in our globalizing world. An India that is open, accessible, diverse and creative, and that succeeds at creating a more decent life for its citizens, is always more likely to remain a positive force in the eyes of the world than its less admirable neighbours.
I believe that the India that has entered its seventh decade as an independent country is one open to the contention of ideas and interests within it, unafraid of the prowess or the products of the outside world, wedded to the democratic pluralism that is India’s greatest strength, and determined to liberate and fulfil the creative energies of its people. Such an India will tell stories the rest of the world wants to hear and is glad to repeat—and that will offer it an inestimable advantage in the global mass media of our information age. Today’s India truly enjoys soft power, and that may well be the most valuable way in which it can offer leadership to the twenty-first-century world.
But one essential fact remains: what really matters is not the image but the reality. If we can make India a healthy and prosperous place for all Indians, the brand will be burnished all by itself. Then, and only then, might we even return to ‘India Shining’.
CHAPTER NINE
‘Eternal Affairs’: The Domestic Underpinnings of Foreign Policy
Back in 1977, as a doctoral student aged twenty-one, I found myself prowling the corridors of the Ministry of External Affairs at South Block in New Delhi for the first time, researching the thesis that was to become my first book, Reasons of State. I was callow, curious and opinionated—a useful combination of attributes in o
ne who hopes to break new ground in scholarship—and my analysis was, with hindsight, overly critical of the received wisdom about Indian foreign policy making. Thirty-two years later, I found myself, after an election victory, seated in South Block as a minister of state, with an insider’s view of the issues I had written so boldly about. It was instructive to realize how much had changed, and how little.
In Reasons of State, a study of how foreign policy was made during Indira Gandhi’s first stint as prime minister (1966 –77), I was struck by the fact that while formal institutionalization existed in the Indian political system, official processes and decision-making channels were significantly modified in their operation to accentuate Mrs Gandhi’s personal, and her advisers’ informal, dominance over institutions. It did not help that in her stints in office, the logic of the parliamentary system was inverted in a way that has not been seen since: the concept of a prime minister as primus inter pares in a Cabinet, accountable to a political party and responsive to the demands of a parliamentary system, was not realized in actual practice, which instead concentrated powers in the executive along presidential lines. This is simply no longer true in Indian politics, but it prefigured a continuing tradition of wide leeway for the prime minister’s office (PMO) in foreign policy making, which persists to this day.
Studying the domestic underpinnings of Indian foreign policy making, I found that public opinion hardly factored in it in those days: there was inadequate articulation of mass views on foreign policy, both urban and rural, underscored by the restricted nature of political communication, and such elite articulation as did take place was largely ineffective. The result was that public pressure on foreign policy—whether through the opinions of the general public, their votes in elections, the activities of interest groups, the arguments of the press, or the positions of intellectuals through or outside the media—failed to influence the creation of foreign policy, even though public opinion always had a major impact when it came to domestic policy formulation. Equally, the organized political Opposition in Parliament, even when it was in power in some of the states, had very little demonstrable impact on foreign policy making, despite paying voluble, if in several ways limited, attention to it. Policy-makers made policy with very little regard to the constraints of elite or mass public opinion. This is noticeably less true today, though again policy-makers have more freedom to disregard, or go beyond, public opinion on foreign policy issues than they do in the domestic arena.
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