THE POWER OF YOGA AND GOOD PR

The Modi Government deserves full credit for launching the International Yoga Day and celebrating India’s soft power. But the related talk about India redefining its global role and position will be just that, if not buttressed by at least a decade of double digit economic growth 

Now that the International Day Yoga is well behind us and our newsfeeds are slightly less crowded by photos of people doing yoga in the far corners of the world, it is time to take a holistic, larger-picture view of the event and see what it really means for India in terms of securing national interests abroad and promoting public priorities at home. First, the fact that the Government has been able to successfully deliver this project in a relatively short time is important in its own right. The Government gains more confidence from the domestic public, which has suffered under a near paralysed regime in recent years. At the international level, such an initiative helps announce India’s reinvigorated presence under a new regime. 

In recent years, India has been reluctant to take on a global leadership role, even though after independence it had sought to position itself as the voice of the newly-decolonised developing world. IYD marks a change in that approach. It is a good start towards becoming a more visible power although it is still too early to say if this will result in India pursuing a more determined and purposeful foreign policy on hard issues such as humanitarian interventions and multi-lateral trade pacts. The second major takeaway from IYD is the cultural narrative that it has generated. IYD helps India take effective ownership of one of its most important civilisational contributions to mankind. It is also the distinctive trademark of a Government that is unabashed about its indigenous identity. Put together, these factors have led to IYD being hailed as a potent symbol of Indian soft power. This is fine but it’s important to issue a cautionary note: Soft power means little, if it is not backed by hard power in terms of economic growth and military might.

This is where the Modi Government still needs to fill in the blanks. While it deserves full credit for the diplomatic success that was the IYD, let there be no illusions that all the talk about India reclaiming its position and redefining its global role will be just that, if not buttressed by at least a decade of accelerated economic growth in the double digits. Yes, the Modi Government has kickstarted the reforms process necessary for development and progress, but there is still a long way to go and many already feel that it is not doing enough. This raises the question: Should the Government be spending its precious resources on promoting soft power when its hard priorities are still to be addressed? There is no one correct answer here, especially since this is not a zero sum equation. But it’s important to ensure that the Government does not conflate putting up a good show with good governance.

The people see through that. Also, it is important to understand the limits of soft power in achieving hard goals. For example, China was one of the first co-sponsors for the IYD resolution at the UN but that did not stop Beijing from also blocking India’s efforts at the UN to censure Pakistan for releasing 26/11 mastermind Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi. In this, China was guided by its own hard-nosed geo-political imperatives, primarily propping up Pakistan as a foil to India in South Asia. Similarly, there is nothing to suggest that America will give any concessions to India, in say, defence negotiations or US visas for Indian workers, even though the US is the second home of yoga. 

Let us also keep in mind that Indian soft power is not a new phenomenon. Long before the Modi Government launched the International Yoga Day, Swami Vivekananda had taken yoga, along with Eastern spirituality, to the West. Today, yoga is practiced all over the world. It is a multi-billion dollar industry and universally acknowledged as an Indian export. Almost all of this has happened organically at the people-to-people level. Bollywood has also been an important source for Indian soft power. The Indian diaspora has played a crucial role in giving Hindi films a large overseas market. Indian films in general are quite popular in the sub-continent. Similarly, Indian fashion, cuisine, the arts and literature all have a global footprint. India’s vibrant pluralistic democracy offers yet another source of soft power. But while each of these may have won the Indian people much goodwill and admiration around the world, they haven’t really helped further Indian interests per se.

In fact, studies show that despite the country’s increasing soft power around world, global opinion about India hasn’t really changed as much as it could have. A 2006 survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs showed that American attitudes towards India, for example, were in fact slightly negative. On major foreign policy concerns for India — such as a permanent position at the UN Security Council, the involvement of foreign troops in India-Pakistan conflicts and global trade practices — there was little support from the American public. A 2012 Pew Global Attitudes survey that looked at how India’s neighbours viewed the country produced a mixed record. Analysts from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka observed a “trust deficit”; those from Pakistan and Nepal criticised India for having a big brother attitude. Only Bhutan and Afghanistan had strongly positive views of India. 

Princeton scholar Rohan Mukherjee adds more depth to this study. He argues that “the impact of a country’s culture and domestic institutions” can be measured in the number of individuals visiting the country for education, immigration and tourism. In each of these cases, he finds that “although the influx of international students, migrants, and tourists has been growing over time, it is still far short of the pull that other major powers exert on these international flows.” He also notes that, “A similar picture emerges when one looks at India’s relative attractiveness as a destination for investors, a metric that speaks to the quality of India’s domestic institutions, political culture, and business climate”.

One important reason for this poor show is that post Nehru, the Indian Government did not much of make an effort to incorporate soft power as a foreign policy tool. It is only in the past two decades or so, since liberalisation in the 1990s, that the state has again taken an interest in promoting India’s soft power. In 2004, the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs was set up to manage relations with the Indian diaspora and in 2006, the public diplomacy division under the Ministry of External Affairs was established. The Indian Council for Cultural Relations has been around since the 1950s but its centres around the world are not a patch, on say, China’s Confucius Institutes that came up much later but already have a much bigger global footprint. And there’s nothing in India to even begin the comparison with America’s Peace Corps, the UK’s British Council, France’s Alliance Francaise and Germany’s Goethe Institut. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi is serious about Indian soft power, this is a good place to start. 

(This article was published in the op-ed section of The Pioneer on June 25, 2015)