BY MUBASHRA SIDDIQUI
Photos by Mubashra Siddiqui

India’s greatest asset lies in its “soft power”, according to prominent diplomat and prize-winning author Dr. Shashi Tharoor.

Speaking at the annual Sheth Lecture in Indian Studies held recently at Emory University, Dr. Tharoor - citing the term’s creator Joseph Nye - defined soft power as the qualities of culture, civilization and democracy which make India attractive in the twenty-first century.

India’s standing on the global scale is improved when people devour its popular culture including movies and cuisine, Dr. Tharoor believes.
What further enhances India’s soft power, he adds, is its pluralism, “Indian civilization is a hybrid civilization...Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the nature of the country.”

According to Dr. Tharoor, India should be willing to embrace its differences and revel in them. “A tolerant society accepts that it does not understand and even that which it does not like,” said Dr. Tharoor, adding that this mattered on the global scale as well.

He referred to recent protests by fundamentalists on the celebration of Valentines Day by Indian youth and the need for artist M. F. Hussein to live outside India due to threats leveled at him by both Hindu and Muslim extremists because of his nude paintings as examples of intolerance.

According to Dr. Tharoor, the definition of Bharatiya Sanskriti or ‘Indian heritage’ has in recent times become “anti-historical and narrow-minded.”

“Hypocrisy prevails that undermines what India stands for. Pluralist India must by definition allow for pluralist expressions [and] Indians must fight to preserve that pluralism,” urged Dr. Tharoor.

He continued, “India’s experience with globalization [has shown] Indians will not become less [because of it]. India’s popular culture can compete with MTV and McDonalds. Baywatch and burgers can’t replace bharatnatyam and bhelphuri… Instead, soft power is enhanced.”

Dr. Tharoor also discussed the guns vs. butter debate, or as he pointed out in the case of India, “the guns vs. ghee debate.” This debate argues the expenditure on defense as opposed to development, i.e. freedom from attack versus freedom from hunger.

Not discrediting the need for hard power or what has traditionally been seen as the military, Dr. Tharoor, also pointed out that “without development no country is worth defending.”

Concluding his lecture, Dr. Tharoor once again referred to India’s admirable diversity and compared Indians – unlike the American melting pot – to be much like a thali.

“A thali, if you have not been to an Indian restaurant, is a large stainless steel plate with a number of different dishes on it, each in different bowls. Each is different; each is separate and doesn’t necessarily flow in to the next. But [they] belong together and combined give much satisfaction to one’s palate,” he said.

Dr. Tharoor’s lecture struck a chord with many of those present. “As Indians, we always have a tendency to assume the moral high ground. If we see anyone copying the American lifestyle, for instance, girls wearing mini-skirts, we automatically disregard them but at the same time we all want the comfort and the standard of living that the same American lifestyle provides. This is hypocrisy,” said Sujata Bhattacharyya, echoing Dr. Tharoor’s views on embracing pluralism globally.

Subhabrata Sanyal, a fan of Dr. Tharoor’s fiction and non-fiction works, added that he found Dr. Tharoor’s arguments on tolerance significant.
“I believe that the narrow view of Hindutva, as espoused by the BJP, shouldn’t exist. In fact, it becomes incumbent on the majority Hindu population that they do not flex their muscles and rather make the minorities feel secure,” said Sanyal.

Bhattacharyya also pointed out that questioning things was very important and not unpatriotic. “In a true democracy, there is always room for disagreement,” agreed Sanyal.


“The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cell Phone: The Transformation of India in the 21st century.”

The title of Dr. Shashi Tharoor’s book is one that catches immediate interest. A collection of essays, the book’s unifying theme is India’s transformation. Major aspects of it were addressed by Dr. Tharoor at the eighth annual Sheth Lecture in Indian Studies at Emory University.

About the compelling title of the book, Dr. Tharoor said not only have elephants and tigers long been associated with India but rather India itself was seen as a slow, lumbering elephant that only in recent times has begun to take on the stripes of an agile tiger. According to Dr. Tharoor, an instrument that symbolizes this change is the cell phone.

“When I left India to come for graduate studies in America, there must have been about 600 million people, and there were 2 million landline telephones… [For a long time,] 97 per cent of the population had no access to the telephone [and] there was an 8-year long waiting list of people to get landlines…From that India, we now see an India where, as I wrote in the book when it went to press in April of 2007, the Indian public had just set a world record by buying 7 million cell phones,” explained Dr. Tharoor, adding that India has since then broken that record to sell 8.3 million cell phones very recently.

According to Dr. Tharoor, what makes the cell phone significant are the people who carry it – namely everybody including the unprivileged such as fishermen, istari-wallahs, and so on. The reasons behind this, he elaborated, are that incoming calls are often free and India has one of the lowest phone bills in the world at an average of $4 a month. “The cell-phone has empowered the Indian underclass,” said Dr. Tharoor..