The assault on the World Trade Centre in New York on 9/11 has already made clear the old cliché about our global village — for it showed that a fire that starts in a remote thatched hut or dusty tent in one corner of that village can melt the steel girders of the tallest skyscrapers at the other end of our global village. Yet that is not all. Some 2600 people died in the World Trade Centre on 11 September 2001. But some 26,000 people also died on that same day around the world — from starvation, unclean water and preventable disease. We cannot afford to exclude them from our idea of global security.

India is already an important player in global institutions, and inevitably will be even more so in the future, as its economic and political power grows. But of course it also has to look to its national security. The perfect Kantian world of altruistic states ready to look beyond their self-interest does not yet exist. States operate in an era of competition with others, seeking to promote their security by leveraging their assets. And this is where “soft power’’ comes in.

If there is one attribute of independent India to which increasing attention is now being paid around the globe, it is the quality which we would do well to cherish and develop in today’s world: our “soft power.’’ It means giving attention, encouragement and active support to the aspects and products of our society that the world would find attractive — not in order directly to persuade others to support India, but rather to enhance our country’s intangible standing in their eyes.

Bollywood is already doing this by bringing its brand of glitzy entertainment not just to the Indian diaspora in the US or UK but to the screens of Syrians and Senegalese who may not understand the Hindi dialogue but catch the spirit of the films, and look at India with stars in their eyes as a result. (An Indian diplomat friend in Damascus a few years ago told me that the only publicly-displayed portraits that were as big as those of then-President Hafez al-Assad were those of Amitabh Bachchan). Indian art, classical music and dance have the same effect. So does the work of Indian fashion designers, which not long ago dominated the show windows of New York’s chic Lord and Taylor department store. Indian cuisine, spreading around the world, raises our culture higher in people’s reckoning; the way to foreigners’ hearts is through their palates.

In the information age, Joseph Nye has argued, it is often the side which has the better story that wins. India must remain the “land of the better story.’’ As a society with a free press and a thriving mass media, with a people whose creative energies are daily encouraged to express themselves in a variety of appealing ways, India has an extraordinary ability to tell stories that are more persuasive and attractive than those of its rivals. This is not about propaganda; indeed, it will not work if it is directed from above, least of all by government.

To take one example; Afghanistan is clearly a crucial country for our national security. Our foreign policy mandarins have their work cut out for them there, and I would be surprised if Afghanistan isn’t a priority for RAW. But the most interesting asset for India in Afghanistan doesn’t come out of one of our famous consulates in the border regions. It comes, instead, from one simple fact: Don’t try to telephone an Afghan at 8.30 in the evening. That’s when the Indian TV soap opera Kyunki saas bhi kabhi bahu thi, dubbed into Dari, is telecast on Tolo TV, and no one wishes to miss it. It’s the most popular television show in Afghan history, considered directly responsible for a spike in functions which clash with its broadcast times. Saas has so thoroughly captured the public imagination in Afghanistan that, in this deeply conservative Islamic country where family problems are usually hidden behind the veil, it’s an Indian TV show that has come to dominate society’s discussion of family issues. I have read reports of wedding banquets being interrupted so that the guests could huddle around the television set for half an hour, and even an increase in crime at 8.30 pm because watchmen are sneaking a look at TV rather than minding the store. One Reuters dispatch recounted how robbers in Mazari-I-Sharif stripped a vehicle of its wheels and mirrors recently during telecast time and wrote on the car, in an allusion to the show’s heroine, “Thanks, Tulsi’’. That’s soft power and India does not have to thank the government or charge the taxpayer for its exercise. Instead, Indians too can simply say, “Thanks,Tulsi’’.

But I would argue that soft power is not just what we can deliberately and consciously exhibit or put on display; it is rather how others see what we are, whether or not we are trying to show it to the world. To take a totally different example: Politically, the sight in May 2004 of a leader of Roman Catholic background (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as prime minister of India by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam) — in a country 82 per cent Hindu — caught the world’s imagination and won its admiration. No strutting nationalist chauvinism could ever have accomplished for India’s standing in the world what that one moment did — all the more so since it was not directed at the world.

Soft power becomes credible when there is hard power behind it; that is why the US has been able to make so much of its soft power. Let us be clear: soft power by itself is no guarantee of security. So I have little patience for those who would naively suggest that soft power can solve all our security challenges. That is absurd: a jihadi who enjoys a Bollywood movie will still have no compunction about setting off a bomb in Mumbai, and the US has already learned that the perpetrators of 9/11 ate their last dinner at McDonald’s. Where soft power works is in attracting enough goodwill from ordinary people to reduce the sources of support and succour that the terrorists enjoy, and without which they cannot function.

Our civilisational ethos has been an immeasurable asset for our country. Let us not allow the spectre of religious intolerance and political opportunism to undermine the soft power which is India’s greatest asset in the world of the 21st century. Maintain that, and true world leadership in promoting global security — the kind that has to do with principles, values and standards — will follow.

Tharoor is under-secretary-general for communications and public information at the United Nations