‘In the Information Age, India must remain the ‘land of the better story’’

Soft power may seem an odd topic to speak about in a lecture that memorialises a famous intelligence chief. Intelligence is thought of as the job of hard men: What has softness of any sort to do with it? But before we can even get to that, what do we mean by “global security’’? National security is something we can more easily understand — keeping a country and its people safe behind defensible borders. What is global security?

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.

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