India’s cultural capital is enough and more to not let Chinese Confucius institutes win the soft-power game. But, can [India] use it in the proper manner?

Narendra Modi takes on Xi Jinping in a soft-power battle in America. “ANYTHING Xi can do, I can do better,” seemed to be the mantra of Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, as he toured America in late September, hot on the heels of China’s president, Xi Jinping.

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi was visiting the US, we went on an ECFR study trip to New Delhi to ask ‘What does India think?’ […] The Modi government, unlike its predecessors, has been harnessing a source of soft power: the Indian diaspora. According to the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs, India has the second-largest diaspora in the world, estimated at over 25 million. Roughly 1.5 million overseas Indians live in the UK and around 3.2 million in the US.

The Narendra Modi government has decided to make India's Buddhism links the centrepiece of its cultural diplomacy thrust through a blitzkrieg of novel projects, after the Prime Minister feted East Asian leaders through his first year in office with references to this religious bridge.

Describing India and the US as "indispensable partners" in the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean Region, the envoys of the two countries have said the bilateral collaboration can have a big impact on global peace and prosperity in the 21st century.

People are strangely fascinated by what other people eat, and even more so when that other person is the head of state. While there is nothing overt about White House state dinner menus, India's External Affair Ministry have always remained taciturn on what was served at the high table, up until recently.

One of the ideas that some of the religious- and nationalist-minded Indians felt at the turn of the last century is that India has something that the rest of the world does not have — spirituality. It was, no doubt, fuzzy patriotism at work when sensitive Indians were feeling the sense of colonial oppression. The man who mooted the idea was the young Swami Vivekananda, and a few decades later it was again articulated by Sri Aurobindo. They were men of their times and they should not be faulted for their refracted thoughts.

Wrapping up an account of the Narendra Modi government’s foreign policy activism in its first hundred days in office, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj claimed last week that Indian diplomacy had moved into high gear with its “fast-track diplomacy”. The foreign ministry’s public diplomacy division has published a colorful booklet filled with photographic evidence of the government’s impressive global engagement in the past three months.