A few days ago, I was listening to External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar talk about India’s path in a volatile world where nothing is certain anymore as he launched a volume of essays about the country’s soft power called Connecting through Culture, where I co-wrote the first piece with Kerala Governor Arif Mohammad Khan on Indian soft power in material and spirit.
The minister gave a particularly nuanced speech (and in many ways not at all the usual spiel that one is accustomed to hearing from politicians on occasions like the one I was attending). He said that the book he was releasing was in a sense a ‘good cop’ product. It spoke about all the positive reasons.
But soft power operates, said Jaishankar, in a spectrum. At one end was the gentle storytelling, in the middle was influence peddling, and on the other end was dominance and projection of dominance.
India, said the minister, mostly played in the gentle storytelling part of the spectrum but it was important, in his opinion, to enable stronger narratives that could challenge any attempt at dominance projection. Soft power can “move into the field of political argumentation, even in terms of a cultural debate and that is a completely legitimate and a very important part of the soft power exercise”, said Jaishankar.
As foreign minister, said Jaishankar, he thinks of soft power as critical to the process of rebalancing that is going on in the world, “a rebalancing which is already creating multi-polarity”. Rebalancing, he said, was much more than the nuclear weapons that a country possessed, or whether or not it had a United Nations Security Council seat; this rebalancing was going far beyond economics and politics.
The example he cited for this projection of soft power, which needed to be countered, was some government or publication defining what democracy was and telling others (in fact adjudging others) of falling short on several parameters. This adjudication, if successful, said Jaishankar, was an example of the propagation of soft power.
Naturally those who were being so judged had a right to counter such views and figure out ways and narrative means to put forward a different point of view.
His views are particularly pertinent as they underline India’s perspective on rankings and ratings on democracy at a time of broad Western decline and heightened friction about values and norms in a fast-changing global order.
They are also important because in a sense it has fallen on Jaishankar to be the yajmana of the yagna of India’s rise. Yagna is the word used in Sanskrit to describe the rituals of worship and sacrifice centred around fire to invoke the divine, ask for boons, and facilitate transition.
Negotiating the parameters and contours of India’s rise at a time of great global power transition and change, when a new world order is emerging, has fallen as the primary task of Jaishankar. As a career-diplomat-turned politician, he has the task of helping navigate India through this order transition. As a former ambassador of India to both the US and China, he is uniquely positioned to understand and explain how this transition could be achieved keeping in mind, and protecting, India’s strategic goals.
One of the most important tasks of course is setting the right narrative for India — something Jaishankar has succeeded in doing in diplomatic circles despite strident propaganda against the country on issues like the abrogation of Article 370 in Kashmir and other contentious issues.
The importance of Jaishankar lies in the fact that he is responsible for ensuring not only that India rises, but it rises peacefully with as little global headwind as possible.
The only other example of a country the size of India rising swiftly to global prominence of course is China. But China’s rise has been fraught with friction which in many ways has upturned the global order. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for India.
It is a challenge because it shares contentious borders with China over which the two militaries have fought wars. Its economy is also impacted by Chinese goods and capital. But it is an opportunity because as the world led by America decouples in many ways from China, the natural home of that capital and technology is India.
Ensuring that this happens most effectively is Jaishankar’s task, a role for which in many ways he has been prepared in his career all his life, not least as the negotiator from the Indian side on the India-US civilian nuclear deal in 2004-5. He is therefore most suited to play yajamana in this period as the Indo-Pacific, and India’s role in it, rise to the forefront of global politics.
The writer is a multiple award-winning historian and author. The views expressed are personal.
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