India’s Soft Power – A New Foreign Policy Strategy by Patryk Kugiel

As the neo-realist consensus seems to reach its twilight, with the locus of power shifting from the “bigger army” towards the “better story”, “India’s Soft Power: A New Foreign Policy Strategy” by Patryk Kugiel remains a timely academic intervention, to make sense of New Delhi’s soft power calculus in harnessing newer gateways of engagement and larger windows of opportunity, in an increasingly post-American global order. Drawing upon Joseph Nye’s liberal internationalist theorization, Kugiel’s scholarship is neatly divided into six chapters addressing the conceptualization of soft power, its elements and resources, instruments, applicability, efficacy, limitations as well as remedial prescriptions. Given the extant academic literature on the subject, which Kugiel rightly deems as “ambiguous” and “inconclusive”, his central thesis demonstrating that soft power must not simply replace but rather supplement New Delhi’s hard power resources, fills an important research gap.

The introductory chapter entitled “Soft Power in IR: A Conceptual Framework” comes off as a foundational primer for readers interested in the theoretical substratum of soft power. Herein, Kugiel introduces the scholarly construct with its fluidities and discursive interpretations. While the section pursues a quintessential juxtaposition of soft power against hard power currencies, its novelty lies in retrieving the subtler admission of the significance of “ideas and perceptions”, “prestige” and “morality” even amongst classical realists. Kugiel adroitly maps a coincidence between the emergence of soft power and the ascendance of liberal and constructivist theories of international relations, suggestive of how both the processes are co-constitutive. With the transition from a “capital-rich” to “information rich” global order, marked by interdependence, transnationalism, techno-centrism and democratization, Kugiel submits that the intangible resources of culture, political values and foreign policy are instrumental in moulding popular preferences through agenda setting, persuasion and attraction. While Kugiel sincerely reaffirms Nye’s cultural, communicational and performance-oriented preconditions for harnessing soft power, he extends them to test their applicability in a non-Western context. Despite his largely celebratory tone, Kugiel exhibits great candour in laying out the quintessential weakness of soft power – its relational and contextual character, promise of false exceptionalism, poor explanatory power, and subjective assessment. Lastly, notwithstanding the multiple typologies covered, the new-age propaganda and disinformation strategies to sabotage political systems, epitomized in the category of sharp power, remains glaringly absent.

The second chapter entitled “Evolution of Power in Indian Foreign Policy” provides a comprehensive historical trajectory of New Delhi’s foreign policy under major prime ministers, following an individual level of analysis. Kugiel problematizes the dominant discourse that soft power had gained traction only in the post-Cold War paradigm, by advancing a novel chronology in New Delhi’s power transition – from soft power to hard power and finally to smart power. The first phase of soft power could be seen as a derivative of civilizational factors of pacifism and co-existence, systemic geopolitical factors as post-war fatigue, domestic factors as low material capacities, and what Kugiel describes as the “human factor” of Nehru. While Kugiel is swift to call out the utopianism around Nehruvian non-alignment, he fails to note its subterranean pragmatism which provided room for India in seeking war-time military assistance even from ideological adversaries, retaining strategic autonomy afterwards, navigating great power re-configurations and harnessing its humanitarian goodwill to realize policy goals. Kugiel characterises the Indira regime to be following a realist doctrine entailing hard power calculus, evinced through her nurturing of tangible power resources – greater militarisation, indigenous nuclear programme and arm acquisition – yet Kugiel glosses over the conceptual and structural weaknesses in her understanding of power. It is well documented that she construed it in personalised and not institutionalized terms, did not adequately invest in coordination agencies for security or in developing conduits to disseminate India’s diplomatic positions to the public. Finally, Kugiel captures the post-cold war diplomatic culture to be adhering to a smart power calculus through greater multilateralism, newer strategic partnerships, composure to provocations and creative messaging of the richness of its classical tradition –shrugging off its “regional hegemon” image in the process.

The third chapter entitled “Sources of India’s Soft Power” locates the preeminent conduits of New Delhi’s soft power calculus in five disparate elements – culture, political values, foreign policy, with Kugiel adding diaspora and economic potential as distinctly indigenous elements. As a visible register of spirituality and harmony, the cultural dimension is neatly categorized by Kugiel along the temporal lines of ancient and modern. The manifestations of the former get situated in Buddhist diffusion under Ashokan tutelage through “conquest by dharma”, as well as oral traditions of Ramayana massified across other Asian locales – both reinforcing the multi-cultural appeal of India.

Kugiel tangentially acknowledges the significance of folk traditions and canonical treatises, before making the temporal leap to modern the modern cultural assets of television and popular culture, literature, dietary culture, sartorial tradition and sport. A closer scrutiny of his exposition on popular culture demonstrates his Orientalist gaze, especially when he maps its telos as “promotion of family and community”. Herein, Kugiel seems to be entrapped in the fallacious binary between rational-individualistic West and the communitarian East.

Thereafter, Kugiel adulates the Indian democratic-pluralistic spirit underpinned by well-accepted constitutional proviso and institutional support, despite its low-income starting point and politico-economic maladies. However, discovering genealogies and antecedents of such a political culture in the ancient corpus or praxis could have been a valuable addition. Kugiel explores the possibility of the Indian democratic variant as an “institutional alternative” to the West, perhaps as an exportable model, but fails to acknowledge how the ongoing Hindutva resurgence, divisive polarization and anti-modernism has already entered the global diplomatic conversations and can deter if not fundamentally derail such a calculus.

Kugiel arrogates a moral high-ground to the central driver of Indian foreign policy, given its historical association with de-colonization, anti-imperialism, de-nuclearization and peace-keeping projects, but such an argument essentializes her foreign policy choices and masks her zig-zag relation with different theoretical frameworks across her diplomatic history. It puts unnecessary moral onus and opprobrium on New Delhi in the wake of her pragmatic choices as evinced in the Russia-Ukraine crisis and Israel-Palestine imbroglio.

Similarly, Kugiel rightly chronicles the dynamic ascendance of New Delhi in the global market, harnessing its democratic dividend, and having a “positive spillover effect”. Such an assessment complemented with her multilateralism effectively explicates India’s larger geo-economic vision of resistance to external shocks as, pandemics, supply chain constraints or war-time crises.

Kugiel expatiates the immense potential of the Indian diaspora, vivid in composition and vast in numerical strength, but he glosses over the historical transition in New Delhi’s approach towards the category, from the Nehruvian prescriptions of loyalty to the new country. The rationalities behind such a positive self-image of the diaspora are equally glossed over – namely increased remittance flow, high offices held by PIOs and benign image of NRIs. Finally, internal ideological variations and absence of permanent consular mechanisms for tracking movement and coordinating agency response necessitate greater scrutiny.

The fourth chapter entitled “Soft Power in Indian Foreign Policy” reviews the extant diplomatic instruments at the disposal of New Delhi to convert soft-power possession to soft power exercise – “partly by the government, partly despite governments”.

At the outset, Kugiel interrogates the workings of public diplomacy through creation of formal diplomatic divisions, novel communication tools, interactive media engagement complemented by semi-autonomous auxiliary research bodies creating and disseminating knowledge of New Delhi’s diplomatic choices. However, it is worth mentioning that such bodies are often starved of funds, stymying efforts to hire leading experts, and mostly prejudiced in favour of the status quo –impeding the quality of research output. Kugiel rightly laments the conspicuous absence of any “state-owned media” in imparting New Delhi’s official policy positions, but does not offer reasons for the same. The minimalistic influence of media is largely due to high secrecy and gatekeeping of critical inputs by bureaucratic elites, unprofessional reportage and lack of editorial control.

Kugiel captures the de-facto channels of cultural diplomacy within the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of External Affairs, as well as the Indian Council of Cultural Relations responsible for a host of scholarship programs, cross-cultural exchanges and lecture demonstrations. However, it is immediately problematized by a caveat of greater innovation and augmented finances, for optimal utilization. Kugiel notes how economic diplomacy remains greatly anchored not just the respective ministries, but also the corporate collectives packaging New Delhi as a vibrant pasture for capital investment. Taken together, these two schema, will greatly placate any residual military insecurities among her weaker or resentful neighbors, who perceive India to have hegemonic designs.

Finally, New Delhi’s aid diplomacy constitutes a significant policy tool for facilitating friendship and cooperation with developing states in general and her amicable neighbors in South Asia, in particular. However, scrutinizing whether it transcends such a liberal logic to equally encompass realist rationalities of politico-strategic gains or for preventing extra-regional balancing would have been a valuable addition.

The fifth chapter entitled “Effectiveness of Indian Soft Power Strategy”  comes off as a comprehensive evaluation report of New Delhi’s soft power calculus, for which Kugiel engages in an analytical reading of the rankings and indices developed by a multitude of Anglo-Saxon firms and corporations. The choice of such parameters appears as paradoxical, given that a point in the very next chapter sheds insight on the Oriental tropes and stereotypical understandings of the Indian social milieu under the Western reportage. Kugiel attributes the mixed image of New Delhi on the indices of soft power to falling tourist inflow, underwhelming track-record in world Olympics, and non-diffusion of Hindi as a globally credible linguistic alternative. Equally interesting, remains the popular perception of India amongst the major state actors, which shows its positive self-image among African states, but quite the contrary in Western Europe. A possible explanatory variable for such a dichotomy, which Kugiel steers clear of, is New Delhi’s projection as a voice for Global South right from her post-colonial odyssey. Kugiel avers how internal security threats and gender atrocities undermine the global perception, suggestive of how innenpolitk shapes aussenpolitik. However, Kugiel’s rationale for choosing two disparate nations as Afghanistan and Poland, to test the efficacy of New Delhi’s soft power. While the former still shares important geopolitical concerns with the India, the same cannot be said about the latter. Supplanting Poland, it would have been more apposite to choose a nation on New Delhi’s regional map, where her soft power has faltered.

The concluding chapter of this scholarly corpus is entitled “Augmenting India’s Soft Power: Modi and Beyond” and it maps the diplomatic schema and the clinical discursive departures taken by the extant ruling dispensation under Narendra Modi – therein following an individual level of foreign policy analysis. At the outset, Kugiel adroitly flags the ideational ambiguity around Modi’s foreign policy, largely attributable to his supposed naivety and inexperience, within the geo-strategic circuit, soon to be proven wrong through his self-assured and assertive policy choices. While the schola centralises geo-economics as the hallmark of Modi’s global vision, evinced through pro-active multilateralism, it is equally imperative to capture the democratization of diplomacy under his tutelage – bereft of any elite gatekeeping. The celebratory impulse around Modi’s dynamic digital diplomacy, crafting public consciousness and crisis communication strategies, can be juxtaposed against the scholarly consternation over the lurid Orientalism of Western media reportage of New Delhi, and its hyperbolic exaggeration of her calamities and catastrophes as the pandemic. The contraposition is suggestive of the sheer inadequacy of digital diplomacy in countering disinformation challenges – something which Kugiel glosses over. While reflecting on the untapped conduits of soft power, Kugiel signposts, sporting events as one such unexplored option. Such an assessment falls short of both factual accuracy and analytical scruple, for it is well documented how cricket diplomacy has been well harnessed to facilitate a conducive cricketing infrastructure for the smaller nations. Geo-politically fragile Afghanistan exemplifies such a case in point, whose cricketing culture has received significant ballast through physical grounds and financial sponsors in New Delhi. Echoing the pithy aphorism how New Delhi cannot afford to be a “super-power” and “super-poor” at the same time, there is an elaborate discussion on India’s “hard power deficits” in her security architecture in the Jammu and Kashmir theatre, Maoist Red Corridor, North-Eastern Insurgency and Jihadist Terrorism. While Kugiel remains largely laudatory of the innovative state endeavours to arrest such processes, he eschews the variegated modalities adopted. Notwithstanding the innovative medley of constructive engagement, coercive clampdown, comprehensive rehabilitation and concerted surveillance, internal security under Modi remains a mixed record. Kugiel expounds the radical rejig of the red-tapism, bureaucratic subterfuge and babu-culture under the current dispensation, encapsulated in the maximum governance quip, but a larger cultural revolution evades his interrogation. The traditional worldly diplomat conversant in cosmopolitan etiquette is no longer the ideal, but rather the internal other, giving way to economically subaltern and culturally rooted diplomats, with greater consciousness of who they are.

In closing, one must aver that this scholarly compendium by striking the perfect balance between abstract theorization and concrete praxis, remains a critical reading for the uninitiated as well as the well-versed. While the textual analysis sounds slightly inconsistent and repetitive at times, Kugiel fares considerably well in indigenizing the Western conceptual category of soft power.

India’s Soft Power

A New Foreign Policy Strategy

Patryk Kugiel

First Published 2017

Routledge

Ratnadeep Maitra

Adjunct Researcher, Asia in Global Affairs

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