External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on Wednesday said “for all the nice talk, hegemonism still lives” and that a large part of soft power exerted by countries was through setting standards and rules.
Speaking at the launch of a book on India’s soft power here, Mr. Jaishankar said while hegemonism may be less effective today, “the fact is that today a large part of soft power is this setting of norms, standards, rules, even political rules”.
“You have debates where some institution, some publication, sometime some government will say... If I had to take one obvious example, somebody would say that there is my version of democracy and by the way I feel you are short on five counts. So this willingness, this desire and this actually clever tactic of passing judgments on others while using a frame of reference and a culture and a specificity and trying to make that universal, that is an enormous exercise of soft power if you can actually carry it out,” Mr. Jaishankar said.
