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.
He said domestic political debates become global political debates and it is very easy to “play up a society and diminish another one”. He said India is engaged in a “battle of soft power” and that soft power was central to “re-balancing” in the world that would lead to multipolarity. He said India’s image abroad was a reflection of the progress made domestically. “Today we are a more inclusive society, more digital society, greener society, a society which has dealt with a lot of legacy challenges of gender... challenges of discrimination,” Mr. Jaishankar said.
Kerala Governor Arif Mohammad Khan also spoke on India’s soft power. The book, 'Connecting Through Culture: An Overview of India's Soft Power Strengths’, is an anthology of essays edited by Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts member-secretary Sachidanand Joshi and Indian Council for Cultural Relations president Vinay Sahasrabuddhe and published by Wisdom Tree.
In a statement, the ICCR said the anthology has 23 articles covering a range of topics such as Indian epics, dance and cuisines, by writers and researchers including Amish Tripathi, Pushpesh Pant, Jaya Jaitley, Christopher Benninger, Kapil Kapoor, and Rajeev Vora.
