The soft power of India

The soft power of India

Context

A mere wish to be praised as a global or regional power should not be allowed to guide our foreign policy

What has happened?

There is a lot of talk these days, not so much among government circles as among the ‘strategic community’, about India being a major or even global power, with the capability, even responsibility, to play an ‘important role’ on the world stage as a balancing power between major powers and as a ‘security provider’ to others

Author view

We have to be realists and check the inexplicable urge to play a big role in international relations 

Questions that we should ask ourselves

What kind of role do we want to play? Where and how do we want to play the role? Do we have the means to play such role?

Status and responsibility

Often the leaders do not realize that playing a role carries with it responsibilities which we may not be able or keen to accept but which we might be dragged into

• Questions galore
  • Are we clear about the kind of role we wish to play internationally?
  • Do we have a role model for it?
  • Do we wish to emulate what Vladimir Putin’s Russia is doing in West Asia?
  • Or, what the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan in the 1980s or what America did in Iran in 1953, in Indo-China in the 1950s and 1960s, and frequently in Central and South America?
• No benign intentions
  • All those operations lacked legitimacy and for the most part cost the countries concerned dear in human and material terms
  • Nor did they bring them glory
  • One will look in vain for an example when such a role was played with benign intentions.

Regional aspirations

• Given our firm commitment not to use force and to non-interference in internal affairs in other states, our neighbors do not feel threatened by us
• If intervention does not succeed, as in Sri Lanka, the ensuing loss of prestige more than offsets whatever prestige we might have gained in the other operations like, in Maldives or Seychelles

The real goals: Strengthen our economy

• The principal criterion in the conduct of foreign policy for India ought to be lifting the poor from poverty
• Whatever brings concrete benefits to our people should be encouraged
• A mere wish to be praised as a global or even regional power should not be allowed to guide the policy
• Our single minded focus should be on economic development
• Without the necessary economic strength, we cannot strengthen our military. We do need a strong military but for that we need undisturbed double digit economic growth for a generation 

Why India should avoid getting entangled globally?

• When other countries flatter us by describing us as a major power, it is invariably because they want to rope us into some schemes of their own
• It is best not to get too entangled in the chess moves of other countries
• The principal interest of most of them is to sell very expensive military hardware to us.
• We do have to think critically about allocating our scarce resources among alternative uses, and since we are a democratic polity with a multi-religious and multi-ethnic society with a large number of poor, we have to think more than twice about defence spending. 

Conclusion

An internally divided India cannot play any role externally. The ‘strategic community’ should concentrate on reinforcing this real soft power of India which is what the rest of the world appreciates and not lose time and resources in peripheral ventures that bring no lasting benefit