Discuss the role of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) in promoting India’s soft power abroad. (2018, 20 Marks)
Joseph S. Nye (Soft Power, 2004) defined soft power as the ability to obtain preferred outcomes through attraction rather than coercion or payment, drawing on a country’s culture, political values and foreign policy. India’s cultural endowment is vast, but attraction needs institutions to become relationships. The Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), founded on 9 April 1950 by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, is the oldest of them: an autonomous body under the Ministry of External Affairs, set up before India had a development agency or a public-diplomacy unit.
Mandate
The Council’s task is to foster India’s cultural relations with other countries and mutual understanding between peoples.
Instruments of soft power
- Indian Cultural Centres: 38 centres across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas teach yoga, classical dance, music and Indian languages, host lectures and workshops, and give local audiences and the diaspora a shared space. They anchor the International Day of Yoga abroad.
- Scholarships: close to 4,000 a year for students from well over a hundred countries. This is the most durable instrument, because it produces alumni rather than audiences. Graduates who studied in India become officials, professionals and opinion-makers with a personal tie to the country, especially in Africa, Central Asia and the neighbourhood.
- Academic chairs and language promotion: chairs of Indian studies in foreign universities (Sanskrit, Hindi, philosophy, Gandhian thought, ayurveda), plus teaching material for Indian-language courses.
- Festivals and exchanges: Festivals of India abroad, exhibitions, and two-way performer exchanges, with Indian troupes sent out and foreign artists hosted.
- Distinguished Visitors Programme: invitations to foreign opinion-formers to see India first-hand.
- Recognition: the Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding (instituted 1965), whose 1993 laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi, carried diplomatic weight.
Significance
- It civilianises India’s image, presenting a pluralist, democratic civilisation rather than a security state.
- It supports strategic priorities: cultural links with Southeast Asia under Act East, Buddhist heritage diplomacy, and engagement with Africa and the Global South.
- It complements the diaspora, ITEC training and cinema.
Limitations
- Scale: 38 centres look small beside the British Council, the Alliance Française, the Goethe-Institut and China’s Confucius Institutes, which reached several hundred within a decade, though the latter’s state control drew the charge of “sharp power” (Christopher Walker and Jessica Ludwig, 2017), a reminder that autonomy is itself an asset.
- Funding: centres have run below capacity for want of money, and the Nehru Award has not been given for any year after 2009.
- Content: programming is heritage-heavy, strong on classical dance and Sanskrit and weak on contemporary art, design, popular music and cinema, which are what actually travel.
- Governance: politically appointed leadership and a bureaucratic style limit agility; digital outreach lags physical presence.
- Conversion: Nye warned that governments control only part of soft power; Ian Hall (2012) found the limits of government action in India’s own drive. India slipped from 30th to 32nd in the Global Soft Power Index 2026, well below its cultural weight.
Way forward
Fund the Council at the ₹500–600 crore the Standing Committee on External Affairs sought in its report on the 2026–27 grants; go digital-first; add contemporary culture; partner the diaspora and cultural industries; and measure impact through alumni networks.
Conclusion
The ICCR has built genuine goodwill, above all through scholarships that create lifelong friends of India. But it remains an under-resourced, heritage-centred body for a country whose attraction is generated mostly by its society. India’s soft power will grow when the Council becomes a convener of that society’s creativity rather than a curator of its past.