Highlights From Day 1 Of The Jaipur Dialogues 

The inaugural edition of the Jaipur Dialogues kicked off today with an illuminating session focussed on the soft power of India. The speakers for this session were author and columnist Tufail Ahmad; scholar David Frawley; Sanjay Dixit, who also moderated the session; and author and commentator, Tarek Fatah.

The session began with a riveting salutation to Saraswati by Mohammed Aman of the Agra gharana. Following this, Sanjay Dixit approached the podium to introduce the theme of the session, provide its context, and share his views on India’s soft power.

The first thing shared by Mr Dixit was that the Jaipur Dialogues was possible only due to social media since it was there that he had met all speakers and exchanged thoughts.

Proceeding to the topic of the session, he added that soft power was an idea whose time has come and that India, for much of its time as an independent nation, had lost out on that count. Cultural nationalism had almost got extinct after 1947, Mr Dixit said, and in the 1970s and 1980s, when he was growing up, Bollywood was the only avenue recognised as containing India’s soft power. Then, a few years later, IT joined in. However, in all of this, the civilizational narrative of India got lost, said Mr Dixit, and added that those who practiced “narrative intolerance” in all those decades, were the ones who were raising the intolerance bogey now.

The context of session was then laid out by him—to rescue Indian history from a narrative which recognises no other. This was about the right to talk about our roots.

Following this, Tufail Ahmad provided a look at India’s soft power from a wide perspective.

Mr Ahmad began by defining soft power as the ability to get what one wants by the force of attraction rather than coercion. He then went out to list the sources of India’s soft power:

1. It’s work in space technology: ISRO with its projects like the Mangalyaan were greatly enhancing India’s image abroad.

2. Bollywood: In Russia, for example, Hindi films which don’t have subtitles, are translated live, Mr Ahmad said.

3. Television: Indian TV soaps were so popular in Pakistan, quipped Mr Ahmad, that some clerics openly spoke against watching them. He added, in the same regard, that India should have a channel like the BBC or Russia TV which would add immensely to the projection of India’s soft power.

4. India’s international peacekeeping efforts were also recognised as a source of its soft power.

5. Yoga, Ayurveda, food: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s efforts gave this aspect a boost, however, Mr Ahmad observed that one reason yoga is popular in India is only because the West had accepted it. That shows India’s weakness, according to him.

6. Indian students in foreign universities with their achievements and hard work also act as source of India’s soft power.

7. India’s new story: This was defined by Mr Ahmad as the possibilities of India’s young population. India needs to have think tanks which can project this capacity and soft power to the world, he further added.

Following this, he went on to say a word about the threat to India’s soft power and the India’s Home Ministry, he said, was a threat to it. This was because rule of law is the responsibility of Home Ministry (even though police comes under states) and law and order problems immensely damage the country’s image abroad.

Hard power necessary but not sufficient

Mr Ahmad then laid out two truths which were then repeated by, and added to, by other speakers at the conclave:

-India requires soft power because hard power is necessary but not sufficient.

-India’s soft power has been built without government support.

Later, in answer to a question he gave an innovative suggestion— that a book should be introduced in schools titled “Who We Are”. This should teach children in early grades about the history of the Indian civilisation.

Dr David Frawley was the next to speak and he commenced his address with the idea that India was not just a nation or country, but a civilisation; and from the standpoint of spirituality and consciousness, maybe the greatest. And while it was a bit late in developing science and technology, nonetheless it was quick in adopting it.

India was the dominant civilisation in Asia for much of history, said Dr Frawley, and that India had never denied its soft power. Even after Islamist and European colonisation, Indian culture had survived.

However, he regretted, what happened post 1947 was a tragedy. The mindset which got independence was abandoned. Instead of promoting it, India’s soft power was suppressed. It lies unused. Herein, the idea of secularism was used to deny and suppress it.

He then gave the example of Communist China starting Confucian schools in China and asked why couldn’t India do that for its traditional knowledge systems?

‘Why did the Nehruvian generation reject all of this?’, was Dr Frawley’s question. And his answer was—because of political considerations.

“Nobody is going to hand over India’s its position in the world” continued Dr Frawley, “India needs to do it on its own.” India’s foreign policy, he said, doesn’t need to be non-aligned but India-aligned.

If it’s noticed, it’s not soft power: Tarek Fatah

Tarek Fatah then took the stage and began with the observation that whenever soft power comes to notice it ceases to be soft power. Britain has soft power, he said, primarily because of the English language. Most English speakers are in India, and that showed the soft power of Britain. Russian embassy giving free Russian classes is not soft power, said Mr Fatah.

In light of recent events, Mr Fatah showed that Indians were not that well equipped to exercise soft power. His example was from the recent US elections where even though, according to him, Trump had the better policy regarding India, most Indian-Americans still voted for Hillary Clinton.

There was a very thin line between soft power and propaganda, Tarek Fatah said. Soft power needs to be internalised, and cannot be consciously practised as a policy.

India needed to assert its soft power, according to him and that cannot happen unless Indians respect themselves.

Hard power needs will to be used

The second session of the day, on India’s hard power saw enthusiastic, probing and provocative questions from the audience. As a result, the question-answer session of this part saw a discussion on wide-ranging topics, and no-holds-barred answers from the panelists.

The speakers for this session included editor of Indian Defence Forum, Yusuf Unjhawalla; stratefic affairs analyst Sushant Sareen; and former Chief Economic Advisor Dr Arvind Virmani.

The session was opened by Yusuf Unjhawalla who gave an introduction to India’s hard power and the usage of it. He cited the integration of Junagadh, Hyderabad, and the Bangladesh war along with the victory in Siachen as examples of successful usage of hard power by India. In current times, this also included anti-piracy operations at seas; Special Forces operations in Myanmar, Pakistan; and rescuing stranded Indians from the remote corners of the world.

At the end of his address, Mr Unjhawala hoped that India be looked up to as a benign power and not an expansionist one like China.

His address was followed by Dr Arvind Virmani’s who gave a scholarly presentation on how hard power was contingent on economic might. Dr Virmani gave data-based points to prove that when it came to China, India was not that far behind economically as many intellectuals claim it is. (Such a revelation, if adopted and analysed in India’s policy circles, is likely to effect a change in India’s strategic thinking vis-a-vis China).

However, he added that one of the most important aspects of hard power is the will to exercise it.

Sushant Sareen then addressed the gathering and built on further on the ideas of Yusuf Unjhawalla and Dr Virmani.

Mr Sareen began by breaking it to the audience that India was not a hyper-power and neither was it a superpower. Hard power is necessary, according to him, but not sufficient. Balance is necessary. In India, however, exercise of hard power has been rendered difficult by the liberal intelligentsia, he said, and continued that while Indian Marxists look down upon nationalism, their teachers in China and Russia were and are extremely nationalistic.

He then went on to define what he called the “Prithviraj Chauhan” syndrome of Indians. We worry about rules of the game when the other side doesn’t care about it.

India, he said, must understand the nature of the enemy it fights. In 1971, for example, what India won on battlefield, it lost on the negotiating table.

Following this, there was a wide ranging discussion on various topics in the question-answer session that followed. The summaries of the views of the panelists on some of these are given below:

1. China would be in trouble if Donald Trump decides to go ahead with the claims he made during his campaign. A large part of the Chinese economy depends on manufacturing and the market in America, and if America decides to pull back, the ‘Middle Kingdom’ will have a crisis. America on the other hand, can adjust by buying from other countries apart from China, but China would not have such an option.

2. The China Pakistan Economic Corridor seems to be appearing as a bad economic investment with each passing day and China seems to be recognising this too. As Swarajya argued here and here, the CPEC will not deliver results in proportion to the investments that were going in it.

3. The no-first-use policy of India regarding nukes might not change, but there is a very strong case for analysts to review it.

4. Dealing with Pakistan needed an Indian leader to take a risk, and Narendra Modi did that with the surgical strikes post the Uri attack. The decision to not disclose to the evidence of it was correct since a) there was no need for the government to do it since all the messages it had to send had been sent and b) it gave both the sides enough space to de-escalate.