Hard truths about soft power

The tiny nation of Qatar has reportedly spent well over $200 billion to host the 22nd edition of the Fifa World Cup, far and away more than any other former tournament host. As with neighbouring Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia, state-backed investment in football, specifically European football, has been this prosperous gas-rich nation’s 

instrument of choice to build up its soft power base.

Ironically, throwing money at the issue hasn’t achieved much. In Western eyes, even as Europe gobbles up its dollars and its gas,Qatar remains an authoritarian Islamic polity that exploits South Asian labour at levels that shade into slavery. Ahead of the World Cup — a shenanigan-filled award in the first place — the commentary mostly centred on the number of workers who died building the stadiums. The Qatari government initially claimed only two casualties but recently admitted to “between 400 and 500”, a discrepancy so huge that it has overwhelmed the virtue of belated truth-telling.

The sub-optimal outcomes of Qatar’s image management project hold salutary lessons for India, which recently assumed the presidency of the G20 with a summit due in November next year. Embedded in the breathless commentary around the somewhat enigmatic summit slogan of “One Earth, One Family, One Future” has been discussions on how the presidency will offer India an opportunity to portray its “soft power” — defined in this case as food, yoga, culture, and so on. As part of this exercise, monuments in select cities are being given the beauty treatment in readiness.

There is much to be proud of in India’s rich syncretic and multicultural heritage, but the idea of projecting soft power as India’s USP is misplaced for a variety of reasons. For one, it assumes a narrow view of the concept of soft power, limiting it to the touchy-feely stuff. For another, soft power is not a standalone attribute that confers on a country some sort of inchoate advantage in the global pecking order. The idea entails a far more broad-based way of judging a country, as Joseph S Nye, the Harvard professor who coined the term in the nineties, reminded us in an article earlier this year despairingly titled “Whatever happened to soft power?”

It is worth quoting the good professor’s definition in full: “A country’s soft power comes primarily from three sources: Its culture; its political values, such as democracy (when it upholds them); and its policies (when they are seen as legitimate because they are framed with an awareness of others’ interests)”.

It’s that fuller definition of soft power that India’s political leadership may need to think about. Certainly, India scores mightily on the first dimension, and it is fair to say that since the 1990s, global perceptions of Indian culture have started moving beyond the standard Bollywood-yoga-chicken-tikka masala rubric. But, culture, no matter how rich or assiduously promoted, can only complement the other two elements of Professor Nye’s construct in enhancing a country’s soft power.  

In that respect, the real concern in India’s soft-power record is the diminishing reputation in the second and third elements of Professor Nye’s definition. Several reputed global indices this year that evaluate countries on parameters that range from political rights, press freedom, civil liberties and so on have downgraded India so severely that the Economic Advisory Committee  (EAC) to the Prime Minister released a paper pointing to flaws in their methodologies. The Freedom in the World index, for instance, saw India’s score drop from 77 in 2018 to 66 in 2002; in the EIU Democracy Index was placed in the ranks of a “flawed democracy and its rank fell from 26 in 2014 to 46 in 2021; and V-Dem produced by Sweden’s University of Gothenburg described India as an “electoral autocracy”.

The EAC’s contention is that these findings are based on perceptions that are less rigorous than those based on hard markers. This is valid up to a point. You only have to look at the phony World Happiness Index to understand the risks of perception-based surveys. The EAC is most indignant that at least two of the surveys have placed India on a par with the Emergency.

But Indians don’t need global indices to judge the non-cultural elements of soft power for themselves. The country is not under an Emergency, that’s for sure. But when you have the increasing mobilisation of rights-restricting laws and institutions such as ED, UAPA, NIA, CBI, it’s hard for a certain generation to forget the days of MISA and COFEPOSA. When you add in the welter of laws and political movements that exclude or oppress the rights of minorities, it’s hard to claim that we check all the boxes on soft power.

Presidency of the G20, which frames the agenda for global progress, may offer India a chance to demonstrate such strengths as it possesses to the rest of the world. But judging from the precipitate exodus of Indians from the country of their birth these past few years, soft power cannot be considered one of them.