A number of new factors now allow India to craft a new cultural diplomacy and rebuild its soft power in East Asia. For one, the initiative on cultural diplomacy has come from Southeast Asia and not India. After all it was the foreign minister of Singapore, George Yeo, who first promoted the idea of a new Asian university at Nalanda over a year ago.

While India talked endlessly about developing a Buddhist circuit of tourism, it was not part of political imagination in either New Delhi or Patna to think of big new ideas about India’s cultural heritage. Thanks to Singapore’s efforts, the Nalanda project is now on the agenda of the EAS.

The celebration of the past is now very much part of an Asian renaissance. As the continent turns prosperous, expands its weight in global affairs, and embarks on building a regional identity, culture and history have inevitably acquired a new salience. And India is an integral part of Asia’s heritage. While it reinvents its cultural diplomacy in Asia, New Delhi needs to focus more on the two-way interaction between South Asian and East Asian cultures and avoid the past crude emphases on what India ‘gave’ to the rest of Asia.

Second, in many parts of Southeast Asia, domestic politics often prevents an acknowledgement of a common cultural past, let alone building on it. It is up to India to make it easier for these countries to explore, discover and preserve the shared history. This would necessarily involve New Delhi’s return to greater cultural openness, which is at the very heart of India’s soft power tradition. Mutual cultural rediscovery can only be one part of rejuvenating India’s soft power in Asia. The rejuvenation should also include India’s readiness to share its emerging strengths in technology and education. This too would demand a radical reorientation of India’s university system towards openness and globalisation.

... contd.