Informal Actors, Public Diplomacy and Soft Power in Indian Foreign Policy

Foreign policy in India is made inside a narrow circle of formal institutions, but it is argued over, supplied, framed and constrained by a much wider set of actors holding no authority at all. Newspapers, think tanks, chambers of commerce, campaigning organisations and thirty-five million overseas Indians cannot sign a treaty or move a battalion. What they can do is decide what a decision looks like when it reaches the public, what information it rests on, and what the government can politically afford to do next.

Influence without authority

• Formal institutions have authority; informal actors have influence, and the two are different currencies rather than stronger and weaker versions of one.
  • Authority is the capacity to take a binding decision — the Cabinet Committee on Security approving a strike, the Union Government ratifying an agreement. The machinery holding it is treated in the companion note on the executive core.
  • Influence changes the environment in which that decision is taken: slower, less visible, much harder to trace, and not therefore trivial.
• Influence works through four identifiable mechanisms, and naming them stops the subject collapsing into a claim that everything affects everything.
  • Supplying information and analysis the state’s own capacity cannot generate.
  • Framing and issue definition — establishing what a development is before the question of what to do about it arises. A border incident framed as provocation and the same incident framed as a routine face-off produce different policy spaces.
  • Creating or foreclosing domestic room for manoeuvre, the most consequential of the four, because a government that cannot sell a concession at home cannot make it abroad.
• The direction of travel is upward from a very low base, in two steps.
  • Liberalisation after 1991 created the conditions: a commercially viable private media sector, business associations with a real stake in external policy, and a diaspora suddenly valuable rather than embarrassing.
  • The period since 2014 added intensity — diaspora engagement as a signature instrument, a denser think-tank landscape, sustained digital outreach — while narrowing the space for foreign-funded civil society.
• The comparative finding runs through every section below: India’s informal foreign-policy infrastructure is thinner than that of the states against which India measures itself — a strategic community numbering in the hundreds, a media reporting the world through foreign wire services, business associations with real access but narrow interests, and a soft-power endowment never matched by capacity to project it.

Actor	Principal channel of influence	Reliability of access	Breadth of interest
Media	Framing, agenda-setting, audience cost	Continuous but indirect	Broad, episodic
Think tanks	Analysis, track-two, public argument	Dependent on official goodwill	Broad, sustained
Business associations	Delegations, consultations, sectoral data	High and institutionalised	Narrow and material
Pressure groups and NGOs	Advocacy, international forums	Low and shrinking	Broad, issue-specific
Diaspora	Remittances, host-country lobbying, symbolism	High and politically prized	Narrow to the community

The actors with the most reliable access to Indian foreign policy have the narrowest interests, and those with the broadest view of the national interest have the least access.

The media

Newspapers, journals and television now take a far greater interest in foreign affairs than in the decades when external policy was a specialist preserve, and the growth of Indian media into a large commercial sector attracting substantial investment gave it the resources to hold positions of its own. The government is consequently forced to factor in views from the ground before deciding questions that touch citizens’ lives.

What media power consists of

• The capacity to draw and sustain attention, of which the harder half is sustain: anything can be made briefly visible, but keeping an issue alive past the news cycle is what converts coverage into pressure.
• Framing and issue definition — altering the discourse around a policy by defining what it is about.
  • The same trade agreement is a market-access gain, a threat to dairy farmers, or a geopolitical alignment; the frame that prevails determines which objection is treated as central.
• Agenda-setting tells audiences what to think about.
  • Second-level agenda-setting goes further: by selecting which attributes are emphasised, coverage shapes how audiences think about a subject they have been told to notice. Media influence over foreign policy operates chiefly at this second level.
• The supply of the public’s entire understanding of foreign countries is the least examined of these powers: almost no citizen has direct experience of the states their government negotiates with, so what the public knows about China, Pakistan or Bangladesh — including the register in which they are discussed — is what the media has said.

The two-way street

• The relationship between media practitioners and policymakers runs in both directions.
  • From the state outward: the government exerts pressure to guide, and at times to manipulate, information concerning policy and the national interest — through background briefings, selective access, the accredited-correspondent system, embedded coverage of operations and the calibrated timing of announcements.
  • From the media inward: reportage and commentary nudge policy, most effectively while a decision is still open.
• Dependency is what makes official pressure effective. A correspondent depends on official sources for the material that makes the job possible, and the cost of losing access falls on the individual while the benefit of critical reporting is diffuse — so the result is self-censorship at the margin rather than overt control.

Reporting the world through other people’s wires

• Indian media largely view developments abroad through foreign news agencies, because Indian outlets maintain only a handful of correspondents overseas.
• The trend has moved in the wrong direction. Foreign bureaus are the first item cut when newsroom economics tighten, and Indian outlets have closed rather than opened overseas postings even as India’s external interests multiplied.

Can the media change policy?

• The open question is whether media can lead a government to adopt, modify or abandon a chosen policy, or only to alter its timing and presentation.
• The CNN effect named the strong claim — that continuous televised coverage of humanitarian emergencies forces interventions governments would not otherwise undertake.
  • The sceptical finding is better supported. Piers Robinson concluded that media influence is greatest where official policy is uncertain and elite opinion divided, and negligible where policy is settled. Coverage does not create a policy; it fills a vacuum where none has formed.
• The Indian application is best put as a live disagreement.
  • The sceptical argument: Indian television after a terrorist incident compresses response time and raises the political cost of restraint, but the eventual decision is taken on strategic grounds coverage does not reach.
  • The counter-argument: compressed time is itself a change in policy. A government deciding in seventy-two hours rather than three weeks has less intelligence, fewer options and less scope for quiet diplomacy — and constraining the choice set is not a lesser form of influence than dictating the choice.
  • The stronger position is the second, qualified: the media narrows the option space; it does not select within it.

The digital layer

• The collapse of the gatekeeping function is the largest change in this field since the standard accounts were written. Editorial judgement once selected for significance; a platform architecture rewarding engagement selects for intensity, and the loudest position on any external question is now permanently visible to the government.
• Digital nationalism imposes a real audience cost, and asymmetrically: de-escalation is punished online more reliably than escalation, which biases the environment towards firmness and makes quiet settlement harder to sell.
• Information operations and disinformation are now a foreign-policy problem in their own right — externally sourced campaigns aimed at Indian audiences, coordinated inauthentic amplification of communal and separatist themes, and manufactured atrocity claims during crises, handled as security questions with attribution disputes of their own.
• The Ministry of External Affairs now speaks to publics directly, and its social-media presence is among the largest of any foreign ministry.
  • Direct communication is not dialogue. A ministry broadcasting to millions without a listening mechanism has substituted an efficient one-way channel for an older one, which is the criticism public-diplomacy theory levels at communications-led approaches.
• The India-Pakistan exchange of May 2025 was fought partly as an information contest, with claims about losses and targets circulating faster than either government could verify them, alongside a large volume of recycled and fabricated footage.
  • The structural point is that verification now lags dissemination so far that the contest over what happened runs concurrently with the event itself. India’s response — structured daily briefings by the services and the Foreign Secretary — was an attempt to re-establish an authoritative account in real time.

Think tanks and the strategic community

• Think tanks matter to Indian foreign policy for four distinct reasons, and conflating them obscures which function is weak.
  • They supply analysis the state cannot generate. With roughly a thousand career diplomats running more than two hundred missions, the establishment has almost no spare capacity for medium-horizon thinking.
  • They train and recycle personnel, and conduct track-two engagement the state cannot conduct in its own name.
  • They build the public argument within which policy is made, which determines whether a government can sustain a difficult position politically.

The institutional map

• University-based international relations is the oldest layer and the thinnest in policy terms.
  • The School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University is the anchor institution and the principal supplier of academically trained specialists; international relations departments across the university system and a few private institutions contribute further inputs, but the academic-policy transmission belt is weak.
• Government-supported institutions occupy the centre of the map.
  • The Indian Council of World Affairs, supported by the Ministry of External Affairs, is India’s oldest foreign-affairs body.
  • The Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, supported by the Ministry of Defence and renamed from IDSA in 2020, is the principal defence-research institution.
  • The Research and Information System for Developing Countries works on trade and development cooperation; the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations on international economics; the Institute of Chinese Studies on the relationship where India’s analytical deficit is costliest.
• Independent and privately funded bodies are the faster-growing layer.
  • The Centre for Policy Research, long the most rigorous independent policy institution in the country; the Observer Research Foundation, now the largest by output and convener of the Raisina Dialogue; the Vivekananda International Foundation, which has supplied a notable share of senior national-security appointments.
  • Carnegie India, the local presence of an American institution; Gateway House in Mumbai, unusual in being outside Delhi and business-facing; the Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru; and the Council for Strategic and Defence Research on emerging technology.

	Government-supported	Independent and privately funded
Funding	Grant-in-aid from a sponsoring ministry	Corporate, philanthropic, foreign, project
Access	Structurally high, formal channels	Variable, personal networks
Constraint	Cannot publish against its funder	Foreign funding governed by the FCRA
Typical output	Area studies, official-track conferences	Commentary, convening, technology
Vulnerability	Budget and appointment control	Licence and registration risk

• The distinction matters as a question about what can be published, not about who is honest. A ministry-funded institution can produce excellent work and still cannot publish a finding its sponsor regards as damaging; an independently funded one can publish it and carries the regulatory risk instead.

Track two and track 1.5

• Track-two diplomacy is dialogue between non-official participants — retired officials, academics, journalists, former service officers — on questions under official negotiation or official deadlock. Track 1.5 describes formats where serving officials take part in a personal capacity.
• What it does that official diplomacy cannot:
  • Explore positions without conceding them, since nothing is attributable to a government.
  • Keep a channel open when official contact is suspended, which is its principal value in the India-Pakistan case.
• The named Indian instances: the Neemrana Dialogue with Pakistan, the longest-running such channel, begun in the early 1990s and repeatedly suspended and revived with official relations; the Chaophraya Dialogue, a later India-Pakistan process convened outside both countries; and the India-China and India-US dialogues run through institutional partnerships, the latter having helped prepare that relationship’s transformation after 2005.

The revolving door

• India’s strategic community is populated substantially by retired diplomats and service officers who move into think tanks, columns and television on leaving office.
  • The case for it: operational knowledge unavailable elsewhere, the ability to read official signalling accurately, and — in a system with no access to foreign-policy files — the only route to informed public discussion.
  • The case against it: it makes the strategic community an extension of the establishment rather than a check on it. Analysts who spent careers inside reproduce its assumptions, and those hoping for later appointments have an obvious interest in not being awkward.

An honest assessment

• The community is small and geographically concentrated. The number of people producing original analysis of Indian foreign policy runs into the hundreds, and the overwhelming majority work within a few kilometres of one another in Delhi.
• It depends on government access for its raw material. Without declassification, a working archive practice or freedom-of-information access to diplomatic records, researchers depend on interviews with officials — which sets a ceiling on how critical published work can be.
• It is thinly funded relative to comparators. Indian institutions run on a fraction of the budgets of major American think tanks or state-backed Chinese institutes, and Indian corporate philanthropy has been slow to fund foreign-policy research.
• The FCRA regime is the sharpest constraint where foreign funding is involved.
  • The Centre for Policy Research had its foreign-funding registration suspended in 2023 and cancelled in January 2024, and contracted sharply thereafter, losing much of its staff and its long-horizon programmes.
  • The episode illustrates a general point: an independent institution’s ability to exist can turn on an administrative decision, and the demonstration effect on other institutions exceeds the effect on the one directly affected.
• The counter-argument is real. The Raisina Dialogue has become a genuinely international convening platform, giving India a strategic conversation held on Indian terms in an Indian city; and the sector has grown substantially since 2010, producing work on technology policy, maritime affairs and economic statecraft that did not exist a generation ago.

Business, industry associations and the private sector

The historical layer

• Big business played a benevolent hand in shaping the newly independent state’s outlook, which accounts treating Indian capital as a purely post-1991 actor tend to forget.
  • The house of Tata and the Birla group financed institutions, funded the national movement and supplied much of the industrial base with which independent India began.
  • The Bombay Plan of 1944, drawn up by leading industrialists, argued for state-led planning, heavy industry and a large public investment programme — capital asking for a directing state rather than resisting one.
• The connection to foreign policy is direct. An industrial strategy built on import substitution and domestic capital goods requires an external posture that protects the domestic market and preserves policy space, which is the economic content of self-reliance and one reason non-alignment had a business constituency as well as an ideological one.

The post-reform transformation

• After liberalisation, industry associations began operating in a manner comparable to American lobbying organisations, engaging government continuously to create a business environment suited to their members’ interests.
  • The Confederation of Indian Industry and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry are the principal general bodies, both with international divisions and overseas offices; ASSOCHAM covers a comparable membership; and NASSCOM represents the sector with the largest external exposure of any in India.

The mechanisms of access

• Business delegations accompanying official visits are the most visible channel, now customary for Presidents, Vice-Presidents, Prime Ministers and relevant ministers travelling abroad.
  • The reciprocal arrangement operates inbound: the visiting country’s embassy, with the Ministry of External Affairs or the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, draws the associations in to organise the business events around a leader’s programme. Influence is thereby exercised over policy at home and over the government being visited at once.
• Joint business councils pair an Indian association with a counterpart body abroad and provide a standing channel that survives changes of government on either side.
• Industry input into trade negotiations is formalised through consultations run by the Department of Commerce, in which associations supply the tariff-sensitivity and employment-exposure data on which negotiating positions are built.
• The state uses business as much as business uses the state. Government draws on these groups’ expertise and resources to conduct its economic diplomacy, because the ministry does not itself hold commercial knowledge at the depth negotiations require. That mutual dependence, not lobbying pressure, is the real basis of business influence in India.

The American market and the limits of lobbying

• NASSCOM’s sustained lobbying in the United States on behalf of Indian information-technology companies is the standard case and a genuine success: over two decades it helped create and defend a favourable environment for an industry whose access to the American market and to work visas was its central commercial dependency.
• That achievement is now being tested. The H-1B fee changes of September 2025, imposing a charge of the order of $100,000 on new petitions alongside tighter adjudication, struck directly at the model the lobbying had protected.
  • The association’s response was measured — arguing the immediate effect on Indian firms would be limited, urging the United States to weigh the benefits the programme delivers to American innovation, and signalling that members would expand local hiring in the United States rather than contest the change frontally.
  • The episode reveals the limits precisely: an industry body can shape rule-making at the margin over years and can do very little against a decision taken at the political level for reasons unrelated to the industry’s arguments.

Trade agreements: influence operating as a veto

The clearest current evidence of business influence is the wave of trade agreements concluded since 2024, because each was negotiated with organised sectoral input and each was shaped as much by the sectors that mobilised against it as by those that wanted it.

• The agreements: the India-EFTA Trade and Economic Partnership Agreement in force from October 2025, carrying an investment commitment of the order of $100 billion over fifteen years; the India-UK Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement signed in July 2025 and in force from 15 July 2026; the India-EU free trade agreement concluded in January 2026; comprehensive partnerships with Oman in December 2025 and New Zealand in April 2026; and a trade understanding with the United States announced in February 2026, cutting American tariffs on Indian goods from 50% to 18%.
• Every one was constrained by the same domestic coalition.
  • Dairy and agriculture were protected in every single negotiation, without exception and irrespective of the partner’s leverage; the Commerce Minister’s own characterisation of the February 2026 understanding was that it protected sensitive sectors including agriculture and dairy.
  • This is influence operating as a veto rather than as a demand — the most powerful form it can take, because a veto does not require the interest to win an argument, only to make a concession politically unaffordable.
• India’s withdrawal from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in 2019 is the same mechanism at full strength.
  • The strategic case for joining was substantial: membership of the largest trading arrangement in Asia, integration into East Asian supply chains, and a seat where regional economic rules would be written.
  • The domestic case against it — dairy producers fearing New Zealand and Australian imports, manufacturers fearing a widening deficit with China — prevailed, and India walked away. Domestic producer interests overrode a strategic decision, which is the sharpest demonstration that the informal layer can determine outcomes and not merely colour them.

Indian capital abroad

• Indian companies’ overseas investments have created acquired stakes in specific bilateral relationships — refining and energy assets, pharmaceutical manufacturing, technology delivery centres, telecommunications and steel holdings across Africa, West Asia, Southeast Asia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
• Diaspora-linked business networks in the Gulf, East Africa, Southeast Asia and North America form a further channel, blending commercial interest with community standing in the host state.
• The consequence is that Indian capital is now itself a foreign-policy interest: investment protection, tax treaties, dispute settlement, the treatment of Indian firms under foreign sanctions regimes and the safety of Indian-owned assets abroad are standing diplomatic business in a way they were not before 2000.

Pressure groups, NGOs and civil society

• Non-political groups, associations and organisations are a genuine source of influence on foreign and security policy, operating through two routes.
  • Formally registered bodies — of which friendship associations and country-specific solidarity organisations are the classic type — have institutional standing and comparatively direct access to policymakers.
  • Informal groupings make their views known through the media, through writings in influential journals and magazines, and now overwhelmingly through social media, which has cut the cost of organising an external-policy campaign to almost nothing.
• The general treatment of Indian pressure groups, including the FCRA’s operation across all sectors, is developed in the companion note on pressure groups in India; what follows takes the foreign-policy dimension one layer deeper.

Where Indian civil society is consequential

• Environment and climate negotiations. Indian research and advocacy organisations supplied much of the analytical basis for the positions India has defended — historical responsibility, per-capita entitlement, differentiated responsibilities and the financing question — and delegations have relied on non-governmental expertise where the ministry’s technical capacity was thin.
• Human rights and the United Nations system. Indian organisations engage the treaty bodies and special procedures directly and are the principal source of material on which international scrutiny of India’s record rests.
• Migration, refugees and labour. Organisations working on Gulf migration have shaped India’s engagement on recruitment practices, wage protection and emigration clearance, and document conditions that consular reporting does not capture.
• Disarmament. A small but continuous peace and disarmament constituency has argued the nuclear question publicly since well before 1998, giving India a civil-society voice on an issue where most nuclear-armed states have none.
• Trade and intellectual property is the strongest case and the one usually omitted.
  • Indian public-health organisations, patient groups and generic-industry allies built the argument that patent rules must not price essential medicines out of reach in developing countries, and supplied the evidence for it.
  • That argument shaped India’s positions at the World Trade Organization, in the TRIPS flexibilities and in the Doha Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health of 2001, and shaped the domestic legislation — notably the exclusion of incremental modifications from patentability — that made India the pharmacy of the developing world.
  • The international effect was real: access-to-medicines campaigns worldwide depended on Indian generic supply, and India’s position here carried genuine normative authority because a domestic constituency had built it. The same coalition resists TRIPS-plus provisions in every bilateral negotiation India enters.

Groups operating on India rather than for it

• Diaspora and ethnic-kin lobbies direct pressure at India as well as on its behalf: Tamil organisations abroad on Sri Lanka, Sikh separatist networks on Punjab, and Kashmir-focused organisations in the United Kingdom and North America campaigning to change Indian policy or to constrain other states’ dealings with India.
• Religious and community organisations with transnational reach — Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh — maintain funding and institutional links across borders with consequences in both directions, and are a principal reason the state treats external funding of domestic organisations as a security question rather than a regulatory one.

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act

• The FCRA is the binding constraint on internationally connected Indian civil society. Its 2020 amendment barred the transfer of foreign contributions between registered organisations, capped administrative expenditure, required identification of office-bearers, and mandated receipt of all foreign contributions into a single designated account in New Delhi.
• The scale is the point. More than sixteen thousand organisations lost their registration between 2015 and 2024, and the ordinary route has been non-renewal and cancellation rather than prosecution, which requires no finding by a court.
• The government’s rationale, stated fairly: foreign money directed at domestic advocacy is a legitimate object of regulation, several organisations were found to have diverted or misreported funds, and no state is obliged to permit unrestricted external financing of campaigns against its own policy.
• The counter-argument is that the effect exceeds the rationale, and that the principal casualties have been research and advocacy organisations rather than the entities the security rationale describes.
• The two-sidedness is usually missed. FCRA restricts foreign influence on Indian policy and, by the same operation, reduces Indian civil society’s reach abroad — fewer Indian organisations in international coalitions and a smaller Indian presence in exactly the transnational spaces where a rising power might expect representation.

The Universal Periodic Review

• India’s appearances before the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review are an unusually direct instance of civil society entering foreign policy.
  • India volunteered to be among the first states reviewed, in April 2008, and has appeared in each subsequent cycle.
  • Domestic organisations file parallel submissions that enter the official record and shape the recommendations India is asked to accept or note.
  • Domestic criticism thereby becomes part of India’s international record by design, not by leak — a rare case of the informal layer holding a procedurally protected route into the state’s external representation of itself.

The diaspora

The diaspora is India’s largest informal foreign-policy asset, and the one on which state policy has changed most completely — from deliberate distance in the first decades of independence to a central instrument of external engagement today.

Counting it, and saying which count

• Two measures are in circulation and they count different things.
  • On the Government of India’s own count there were about 35.42 million overseas Indians in January 2024 — roughly 15.85 million non-resident Indians, who are citizens living abroad, and about 19.57 million persons of Indian origin and Overseas Citizens of India, who are foreign nationals of Indian descent.
  • On United Nations migration measures there were about 18 million Indian-born international migrants, the largest such stock in the world, ahead of Mexico and China.

Remittances

• India received a record $135.46 billion in remittances in FY 2024-25, a rise of about 14%, and remains the world’s largest recipient by a wide margin, and net private transfers rose further to a record $144.8 billion in FY 2025-26.
• The United States is now the largest single source, ahead of the Gulf, the United Kingdom and Australia — tracking the movement of Indian migration towards skilled, higher-earning destinations.
• The macroeconomic function is what makes this a foreign-policy fact. Remittances run at roughly 3.5% of GDP, exceed annual foreign direct investment inflows, and proved stable through the global financial crisis and the pandemic. They are a large external-account cushion that creates no debt and no repayment obligation.

From distancing to engagement

• Nehru adopted a deliberate policy of distancing from overseas Indians, and it was a reasoned position rather than neglect.
  • The judgement was that championing overseas Indians would be read as interference, would compromise the communities themselves by marking them as agents of a foreign power, and would sit badly with a foreign policy built on solidarity with newly independent states. Persons of Indian origin were told to identify with the countries they lived in.
• The costs were borne in the 1960s and 1970s. Indian communities in East Africa faced expulsion and dispossession; Burma nationalised businesses and drove out a large Indian population; Fiji and Sri Lanka produced long disputes over citizenship and political rights in which India had chosen in advance to have limited standing.
• The reversal from the early 1990s was driven by necessity and then by recognition: the balance-of-payments crisis made non-resident deposits and remittances immediately valuable, and the visible success of Indian professionals abroad made the community look like a resource.

	The distancing era (1947 to c. 1990)	The engagement era (c. 1991 onward)
Premise	Advocacy would be read as interference	The diaspora is a national asset
Message to the community	Identify with the host country	Retain the connection, invest, advocate
Legal status offered	None beyond citizenship rules	PIO and OCI cards, later merged
Institutional home	None	MOIA 2004, merged into the MEA 2016
Principal cost or risk	East Africa, Burma, Fiji, Sri Lanka	Host-state suspicion of dual loyalty

The institutional architecture

• The High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, chaired by L.M. Singhvi and reporting in 2001, is the formal turning point: it surveyed the diaspora worldwide and recommended the machinery that followed.
• Pravasi Bharatiya Divas has been held since 2003, on 9 January, the date of Gandhi’s return from South Africa in 1915; the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award honours overseas Indians for distinction and for service to India’s interests.
• The PIO and OCI card schemes gave long-term visa-free entry and residence rights short of citizenship, and were merged into a single OCI category in 2015.
• The Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs was created in 2004 and merged back into the Ministry of External Affairs in 2016, and the merger cuts both ways — mainstreaming diaspora work into the ministry that runs the missions delivering it, or downgrading a function that had briefly held Cabinet standing.
• Know India and Study India programmes, corporate internships for diaspora youth and scholarships form the generational layer, aimed at second and third generations for whom the connection is inherited rather than lived.

Diaspora diplomacy after 2014

• Diaspora engagement became a signature instrument of prime ministerial travel after 2014, conducted through large stadium addresses — Madison Square Garden, Wembley, Sydney, “Howdy Modi” in Houston in 2019 and the reciprocal “Namaste Trump” in Ahmedabad in 2020.
• What these events are for is not what they appear to be. The apparent audience is the diaspora; the real audience is the host government. A stadium filled with the host country’s own citizens, often with the host leader on the platform, signals that a domestically significant electoral constituency cares about this relationship — which is the currency in which democracies decide.
• The instrument therefore works best in democracies with concentrated, politically active Indian-origin populations, and is close to useless where the diaspora is large but politically voiceless — which describes the Gulf, where India’s most vulnerable overseas population lives.

What the diaspora delivers

• Remittances and investment, and participation in domestic programmes: overseas Indians have been courted to invest through Make in India and to contribute to Digital India.
• Lobbying in host countries is the most concrete political return, and the 2008 India-United States civil nuclear agreement is the standard case.
  • Indian-American organisations ran a sustained congressional campaign for the enabling legislation at a moment when Congress was being asked to carve India out of a non-proliferation architecture built to exclude it.
  • The community did not create the strategic decision — the United States had its own reasons. What it supplied was the domestic American political margin that allowed the decision to survive legislative scrutiny, which is both what diaspora lobbying can do and its limit.
• Cultural projection and brand value: the community carries Indian food, festivals, film and religious practice into host societies as lived presence rather than promotion, and the professional prominence of Indians in technology, medicine and academia has become a substantial component of how India is perceived.
• The growing political prominence of the diaspora in host countries is two-edged. Indian-origin ministers and legislators raise India’s profile and open channels; they also owe their positions to national electorates and have every incentive to demonstrate that they are not acting on India’s behalf.

Limits and risks

• India’s capacity to protect its diaspora’s interests is limited, as official assessments have conceded: given the scale of domestic challenges it is unrealistic to expect India to influence events inside other states on behalf of its overseas communities.
• Fiji is the standing historical case. The coups of 1987, 2000 and 2006 turned on the political position of the Indian-origin community; India protested bilaterally and multilaterally, went as far as closing its High Commission in Suva, and achieved very little.
• The Gulf is the standing contemporary case. Millions of Indian workers live under kafala-type sponsorship tying legal status to a single employer, with limited recourse on wages and conditions. India has negotiated labour agreements and expanded consular welfare, and the mismatch between the diaspora’s economic importance and the state’s ability to secure its conditions is the largest gap in diaspora policy.
• Diaspora activism can create foreign-policy problems rather than solve them.
  • Khalistani activism in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia — referendums, demonstrations at Indian missions, campaigns aimed at host legislatures — has been a recurring irritant and produced the sharpest current rupture.
  • The India-Canada breakdown followed the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia in June 2023 and the Canadian Prime Minister’s September 2023 statement alleging a link to Indian agents, which India rejected as absurd and motivated. Expulsions, a parity demand that removed dozens of Canadian diplomats, suspended visa services and withdrawn high commissioners followed.
  • The relationship has since been substantially repaired. Modi and Mark Carney agreed at the G7 summit in June 2025 to restore full diplomatic ties, reinstate high commissioners and resume trade negotiations, and a roadmap in March 2026 launched minister-level trade talks. The underlying disagreement is unresolved; both governments have chosen to insulate the rest of the relationship from it.
• The critique of stadium diplomacy is that it conflates the diaspora with a party constituency, risking the conversion of a national asset into a partisan one — which makes engagement vulnerable to changes of government at home and lets host-country critics call the community an instrument of a foreign party.

Consular protection and evacuation

• Evacuation is the state’s reciprocal obligation and its most visible diaspora work. The 1990 airlift from Kuwait, moving over 170,000 people, remains the largest civilian air evacuation ever conducted; Operation Raahat followed from Yemen in 2015, Operation Ganga from Ukraine in 2022, Operation Kaveri from Sudan in 2023, and the Vande Bharat Mission repatriated millions during the pandemic.

The diaspora is simultaneously an asset India deploys, a constituency India must answer to, and a source of problems India did not choose.

Soft power

The concept and its critics

• Joseph Nye formulated soft power as obtaining preferred outcomes through attraction rather than coercion or payment.
• Nye’s formulation of the mechanism: a state can affect others’ behaviour by coercion, by payment, or by attraction — and attraction is the one he named soft power.
• Nye identified three sources: a country’s culture where it is attractive to others; its political values, when it lives up to them; and its foreign policy, when that policy is seen as legitimate.
• Smart power is his later refinement — the deliberate combination of hard and soft instruments — and it carries the caution most often dropped when the concept is borrowed: soft power alone achieves very little, and no amount of cultural promotion undoes a visible governance failure.
• The critiques are serious.
  • It is not measurable. Attraction has no unit, and indices purporting to rank it aggregate reputation surveys with proxies chosen for availability rather than validity.
  • It cannot be directed. The strongest attractors — cinema, cuisine, migration, universities — are generated by societies, and a state that tries to control them usually reduces their appeal.
  • It is a resource, not a form of power. Power produces outcomes; attraction is a condition that may or may not be converted into one, and treating the resource as the outcome is the standard error in writing about India.

India’s endowment

• Shashi Tharoor made the fullest argument for India as a soft-power state, and his formulation of the relationship between the two kinds of power is its sharpest statement.

“Hard power without soft power stirs up resentments and enmities; soft power without hard power is a confession of weakness.”

Shashi Tharoor

• Democratic credentials and the plural, secular constitutional order are the foundation. India’s success in weaving many ethnic, religious, linguistic and caste strands into one polity is a singularly strong advertisement for its national experiment, whatever the frustrations of the fight against poverty.
  • The decisive electoral repudiation of the Emergency in 1977 did more for India’s standing than any campaign: it showed that Indian democracy could reverse an authoritarian turn from within, generating an international conviction of its durability that has outlasted the episode by half a century.
• A large English-speaking professional pool, and the presence of Indian skilled workers across Asia and the West, which is itself a form of attraction — finance and technology sectors from Singapore to California recruit directly from Indian campuses.
• A diverse popular culture, cinema most travelled of all: Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai and Shah Rukh Khan became icons of India’s cultural image across West Asia, Africa, Central Asia and Southeast Asia long before any government programme addressed those audiences.
• Food, handicrafts, textiles and design; yoga; ayurveda and traditional medicine; and the philosophical and religious inheritance whose reach across Asia — Buddhism above all — created links predating the modern state system by two millennia.
• The historical record of refuge. India has over millennia offered refuge and, more importantly, religious and cultural freedom to Jews, Parsis, several Christian communities and Muslims — a fact that deserves to be far better known internationally than it is.
• Sunil Khilnani placed the argument on firmer ground than cultural inventory allows: India’s international standing rests on its political legitimacy rather than on any accumulation of power — and political legitimacy lies at the core of soft power for any state.

The Asian dimension

• Uma Purushothaman describes the Southeast Asian states as India’s civilisational neighbours, with the useful observation that — unlike several contiguous neighbours — none of them has a border dispute with India. Attraction operates most cleanly where it is not competing with a territorial grievance.
• The failure came first and explains the later success.
  • In the post-independence decades India failed to make the most of its cultural assets in Asia, and its cultural diplomacy was perceived as gauche, appearing to suggest that Southeast Asian states were India’s cultural colonies.
  • Appeals to Asian solidarity failed because those states had no wish to subordinate their national identities to high-minded notions of Asian unity, and did not accept that India was the mother of all civilisations in Asia.
  • India was also seen as economically lagging behind the Asian Tigers and not yet a serious geostrategic player, which stripped the cultural appeal of any material foundation.
• Since the early 1990s India has engaged more pragmatically, shedding earlier notions of cultural superiority and relying as much on contemporary forms as on heritage. The general lesson is that cultural affinity amplifies a relationship with substance and cannot substitute for one without it, as the early Look East policy demonstrated.

Instruments and channels

• Cricket is a genuine relationship-builder, and the Indian Premier League extended it — drawing Australian, New Zealand, South African and Caribbean players into an Indian competition and generating attention no cultural programme has matched.
• Sporting diplomacy is undercut by delivery. The Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010 offered a real opening with Asian and Pacific Commonwealth countries; the organisational failures surrounding them converted an advertisement into a demonstration of the opposite.
• Buddhist circuit tourism is the most underexploited asset in the inventory — sites of first-order significance across Buddhist Asia, with dedicated rail services and Japanese-supported infrastructure behind them — and religious and heritage tourism generally is a larger draw than its promotion suggests.
• The tourism proposition is undercut by the experience delivered. Overpriced and sub-par facilities, chaotic local conditions and unsympathetic site bureaucracies mean the promotional campaign promises what the visit does not deliver, even where the archaeological attractions are stupendous. A campaign that outruns the product damages attraction rather than building it.
• Education works through foreign students, scholarships and institutional networking — including the linking of Indian institutions with the ASEAN University Network for accreditation, joint research and exchange, and the establishment of chairs in Indian studies and Indian languages abroad.
  • The numbers show how far delivery falls short of ambition: India hosted about 58,000 international students in 2023-24 from 173 countries, against a Study in India target of two hundred thousand by 2023, with roughly a quarter coming from Nepal alone — a regional rather than a global education destination.
• Jehangir Pocha’s comparison remains the clearest: China’s principal calling card has been its economic success, while India has relied on a mix of constitutional, political, economic and cultural assets — a broader base but a more diffuse one.
  • Between India and China specifically, soft-power instruments are unlikely to prove effective against narrow calculations of economic and geostrategic self-interest; growing economic interdependence is more likely to stabilise that relationship than attraction is.

The democracy question

• S.D. Muni examined why democracy promotion never became a central theme of Indian foreign policy, and located the answer in earlier orientations: non-alignment drew its rationale from anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism, and democracy promotion would have breached the solidarity of the movement India led under that umbrella.
• The position changed after 2000 without becoming a doctrine. India was a founding member of the Community of Democracies in 2000 and an early contributor to the United Nations Democracy Fund; Vajpayee argued in 2001 that the new world order would be shaped by the success of pluralistic democratic societies in defeating the ideology of bigotry that drives terrorism; and India has supported the Commonwealth’s role under the Harare Declaration.
• The distinction that survives is deliberate. India advertises its democratic credentials when dealing with democracies and joins multilateral activity centred on democracy, while avoiding public promotion of democracy against patently undemocratic regimes.
  • Myanmar is the standing illustration — sustained criticism from Indian civil society and sections of the media over India’s accommodation of military rule, against an unwavering official position that democracy cannot be imposed from outside. Criticism of partners’ political systems does not come readily to Indian diplomacy, in contrast to the more strident Western approach.

Human rights as the parallel case

• India has subscribed to the major human-rights treaties but not to the optional protocols permitting individual complaint once domestic remedies are exhausted — accepting the norms while withholding the enforcement mechanism.
• It volunteered to be among the first states reviewed under the Universal Periodic Review in 2008, a confident act at a time when the procedure was untested.
• The pattern its own civil society criticised was that Indian delegations accepted praise for the positive features of India’s record readily and answered the sharper questions with less specificity.
• The recurring international questions are consistent across cycles: caste discrimination, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, and restrictions on foreign funding of non-governmental organisations, cited as inhibiting research and activism on politically sensitive subjects.

The limits, and where endowment outruns machinery

• Soft power cannot repair what domestic failure destroys. No amount of cultural promotion undoes the damage of a corruption scandal or a governance failure visible from outside.
• Attraction does not convert into outcomes without capability. India is widely admired and rarely followed; states that find India attractive have not on that account supported it on Security Council reform or on trade positions.
• Soft power works better at distance than nearby. India’s neighbours experience its culture and its power together, so attraction arrives entangled with asymmetry.
• The endowment is a national asset; the projection capacity is a state function never resourced to match it.
  • The British Council, the Alliance Française and the Goethe-Institut built dense global networks over decades and were outpaced in scale by China’s Confucius Institutes, which reached several hundred centres across more than a hundred countries within a decade. Against them the ICCR operates 38 cultural centres, and India’s semi-official modes of cultural projection are correspondingly modest.
  • Reputation indices reflect the gap rather than the endowment: India stood 32nd in the Global Soft Power Index for 2026, having slipped two places, behind states with a fraction of its cultural inheritance and far more machinery.

Public diplomacy

What public diplomacy is, and what it is not

• Public diplomacy is a government’s communication with foreign publics rather than with foreign governments — an attempt to shape the environment in which another state’s policy towards you is made, by reaching the society that state answers to.
• It is distinguished from propaganda by being two-way and dialogic: propaganda transmits, while public diplomacy is meant to listen and to build relationships persisting beyond any message.

Activity	Audience	Direction	Relation to public diplomacy
External publicity	Foreign media and publics	One-way	Its older ancestor
Cultural diplomacy	Foreign publics	Two-way in form	One of its instruments
Propaganda	Any	One-way, intent concealed	What it is defined against
Public diplomacy	Foreign publics, and domestic ones	Dialogic	—

• The “new public diplomacy” literature shifted emphasis from messaging to networks, listening and relationship-building — from what a state says about itself to the relationships it convenes, in which credibility rather than volume is the scarce resource.

The Indian institutional history

• The External Publicity Division is the long-standing instrument, dating to the early years of the republic: a one-way apparatus for briefing foreign correspondents, distributing material and managing the ministry’s public statements.
• The Public Diplomacy Division was created in the Ministry of External Affairs in 2006, mandated to explain the background of policy decisions day to day, promote a positive image of India, and engage scholars, think tanks and the media.
  • Its early activity was genuinely innovative: sponsorship of conferences and documentaries, an outreach programme aimed at domestic as well as foreign audiences — recognising that garnering domestic support for foreign policy is itself a task — and India’s first public-diplomacy conference in Delhi in December 2010.
  • Its adoption of social media was notably early and aggressive. The division opened the ministry’s Twitter presence in July 2010 and expanded rapidly across other platforms, winning national e-governance awards and making the Ministry of External Affairs one of the most-followed foreign ministries in the world, a position it retains.
• In January 2014 the Public Diplomacy Division was merged with the External Publicity Division into a single external publicity and public diplomacy division.
• The creation and the absorption have to be assessed together.
  • Why it was created: India’s external profile had outgrown its capacity to explain itself; the nuclear agreement had shown that foreign publics were now a variable; and a purely publicity-based apparatus could not conduct engagement with scholars, media and think tanks.
  • What it achieved: a step change in India’s digital presence, a durable habit of official engagement with the strategic community, a body of documentary and conference output, and the establishment within the ministry of the idea that foreign publics are a legitimate object of policy.
  • What the merger says: that public diplomacy in India was institutionalised as a communications capability rather than as a distinct diplomatic function. Absorption into external publicity subordinated the dialogic ambition to the messaging apparatus, and it is telling that the visible legacy is broadcast reach rather than any listening mechanism.
  • The judgement: the division’s creation was correct and its work valuable, but its absorption shows that India adopted the tools of public diplomacy without adopting its theory. Efficiency in transmission was retained; the two-way character that distinguishes the activity from publicity was not built.
• The vocabulary the practice generated is diagnostic — India’s ‘media diplomacy’, ‘soundbite diplomacy’, ‘instant diplomacy’ and ‘real-time diplomacy’ all describe a capacity for immediate response. The tension is between real-time responsiveness and patient relationship-building: influence comes from relationships built over years, while a real-time apparatus is optimised for the news cycle.

The Indian Council for Cultural Relations

• The ICCR was founded in 1950 by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, independent India’s first Education Minister, with a mandate to strengthen cultural relations and mutual understanding — an institution created before the state had a development agency or a public-diplomacy division. It is an autonomous body under the Ministry of External Affairs, headed by a President who is usually a political appointee.
• Its instruments, at current scale.
  • Cultural centres abroad: 38 Indian Cultural Centres across Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, teaching yoga, dance, music and Indian languages.
  • Scholarships: over 4,000 awarded annually to students from close to 190 countries, with more than eight thousand foreign students in India under its schemes at any time — its most durable instrument, because it produces alumni rather than audiences.
  • Chairs of Indian studies and Indian languages: about 53 academic chairs in 33 countries, covering Sanskrit, Indian philosophy, Gandhian thought, ayurveda and classical literature.
  • The Distinguished Visitors Programme, bringing opinion-formers and public figures to India on the Council’s invitation; festivals of India abroad; and performer exchange in both directions, roughly eight hundred Indian artists sent abroad annually against over a thousand foreign performers hosted.
  • The Jawaharlal Nehru Award for International Understanding, instituted in 1965 and administered by the Council. Aung San Suu Kyi was the 1993 laureate — an award carrying real diplomatic weight given India’s simultaneous accommodation of Myanmar’s military government.
• The assessment has three parts.
  • The reach in Asia and Africa is real, and the scholarship programme in particular has built a constituency of foreign professionals with a first-hand relationship to India that no broadcast instrument could produce.
  • The funding is not commensurate. The Standing Committee on External Affairs has recommended raising the Council’s allocation to ₹500–600 crore, which establishes that the present figure sits below that, within a ministry budget itself only about 0.4% of central expenditure. Cultural centres have run at reduced activity for want of funds, and the Nehru Award has not been conferred since 2009.
  • The content criticism is that it is heritage-heavy and contemporary-light: classical dance and Sanskrit are well served, while Indian design, contemporary art, popular music and the film industry — which is what actually travels — are underrepresented.
  • The instrument question is open. Physical centres are expensive, fixed and slow, and a digital-first strategy would reach far more people far more cheaply; the counter-argument is that presence produces relationships and broadcast produces impressions, and public diplomacy exists to build the former.

The other instruments

• The International Day of Yoga is the single most successful piece of Indian public diplomacy. Proposed at the General Assembly in September 2014, the resolution was adopted on 11 December 2014 without a vote with 177 co-sponsors, the highest ever recorded — converting a cultural asset into a permanent fixture of the United Nations calendar at negligible cost.
• Vaccine diplomacy through Vaccine Maitri, launched in January 2021, supplied over 160 million doses to some 96 countries within a year, as grants, commercial supply and COVAX contributions.
  • The reputational cost of the suspension must be stated. Exports halted in late March 2021 when India’s second wave overwhelmed domestic supply, resuming only in October. The suspension was unavoidable; the damage came from having positioned India as a reliable supplier and then showing that supply was conditional. Public diplomacy built on capability inherits that capability’s volatility.
• Disaster relief and humanitarian assistance work as public diplomacy because they are witnessed rather than announced: the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, in which India declined external assistance and supplied it to others; the Nepal earthquake in 2015; Operation Dost in Turkey and Syria in 2023; and a standing first-responder posture in the neighbourhood.
• Development partnership is the largest instrument by expenditure. ITEC, running since 1964 across some 158 partner countries, supplies the most widely distributed Indian government programme in the developing world; lines of credit finance infrastructure; and the Overseas Development Partnership head of the ministry’s budget stands at ₹6,997 crore in 2026-27, over 31% of its total.
• Institutions India created are public diplomacy through convening — the International Solar Alliance, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure and the Global Biofuels Alliance, each giving India a standing role on an issue where it can claim both interest and competence.
• Digital public infrastructure is the newest and possibly most effective instrument. India has signed cooperation agreements with more than twenty countries to share the India Stack approach — identity, payments and data exchange built as public goods — and it works because it offers a replicable capability rather than an image.
• The Voice of the Global South Summits institutionalised the constituency, the third edition in August 2024 drawing 123 countries.

Public diplomacy and India’s global standing

• What it has demonstrably achieved.
  • A very large increase in visibility: India is present in far more international conversations, on more subjects, than two decades ago.
  • Two unambiguous successes — yoga, converted into a permanent multilateral observance, and vaccines, which bought standing across Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean that declaratory diplomacy had not produced.
  • A Global South constituency that delivered a concrete outcome: the African Union’s admission to the G20 during India’s 2023 presidency, secured by consensus, is the clearest instance of accumulated goodwill converting into an institutional result India wanted.
• What it has not achieved.
  • The neighbourhood, where India’s public image is weakest precisely where engagement is deepest. Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives have all seen domestic politics organised around resistance to Indian influence, and public diplomacy cannot dissolve a grievance whose source is asymmetry.
  • Conversion. United Nations Security Council reform has advanced no distance despite two decades of campaigning and near-universal declaratory sympathy, and states that praise India’s development model have not generally voted with it when doing so was costly.
• The judgement: public diplomacy has substantially raised India’s salience and only marginally raised its influence. That is not a failure of technique but a demonstration of Nye’s own caution — attraction is a resource requiring capability and bargaining to convert, and a state investing in the resource while under-investing in the machinery ends up widely admired and rarely decisive.

Assessment

• The informal layer has grown and remains structurally thin: more think tanks, more business engagement, more diaspora activity and more digital reach than at any previous point, and measured against comparators still a small strategic community, a media reporting the world at second hand, and a civil society whose international connections are constrained by design.
• Influence is unevenly distributed in a revealing way. The actors with the most reliable access — business associations and the diaspora — have the narrowest interests, and are effective on tariff lines, visas and particular bilateral relationships and silent on everything else. Those with the broadest view — the strategic community and civil society — have the least access and the most precarious funding, so the informal layer supplies pressure but not deliberation.
• The deeper finding concerns soft power. India’s soft-power endowment is a national asset generated by society; its projection capacity is a state function never resourced to match. Cinema, cricket, cuisine, the diaspora, the constitutional experiment and the philosophical inheritance are produced by Indians without instruction; the machinery that would carry them depends on a ministry budget of roughly 0.4% of central expenditure.
• Which sets the real limit. A state can neither manufacture attraction nor spend its way to it, but it can fail to build the institutions through which attraction becomes relationships and relationships become outcomes.

India’s problem is not that the world finds it insufficiently attractive; it is that attraction has never been given the institutions through which it becomes influence.