The India: Inside Out Project

APDS Blogger: Maya Babla

This December, a group of seven graduate students from the Master of Public Diplomacy program at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism will embark on a journey to India. We will visit New Delhi and Mumbai, meeting with a range of stakeholders interested in how this global player is positioning itself to foreign and domestic audiences.

For us, public diplomacy is very much an instrument of soft power. We seek to inform and engage people in our countries, but also far beyond. We are fully aware of some of the stereotypes about NATO that still drive public perceptions in some countries.

Rather than seeking to change the Afghan uniformed services into clones of the Germans, the Poles or the Australians, it would be both cheaper and more effective to have such training carried out by a nearby military that shares several cultural and historical links with the people of Afghanistan.

After 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, whereas India projected soft power into Afghanistan, having by now invested some $ 2 billion in reconstruction and infrastructure building in Afghanistan, Pakistan stuck to its old paradigm of offering safe havens to and supporting a proxy war by the Taliban and Haqqani network.

Those who doubt this need only look at the bipartisan public diplomacy failures of the last decade, or today at the critical elections in Egypt, where the U.S. has an astonishing lack of situational awareness and influence.

Wary of Pakistan, Indian officials have always said they want to focus on what they like to call “soft power” – economic aid and trade. The two leaders also agreed to closer co-operation in the strategically key sectors of oil and gas exploration, mining and infrastructure development, pledging to use India’s growing economic clout to foster trade and investment flows.

India has offered to train Afghan police to help them prevent future terrorist attacks in a move likely to be seen as highly provocative by long-time rival Pakistan. India has long maintained that its support for Afghanistan is civilian in nature and driven by what its officials call “civilisational links”.

Washington and Islamabad may have traded accusations and veiled threats in recent weeks, but a series of joint concerts here by an American jazz band and a Pakistani soft-rock group demonstrated that in nonpolitical spheres the two countries can have a productive and at times — does one dare say it? — harmonious relationship.