Six months after the launch of the India: Inside Out project, the results are in. Indian Public Diplomacy: A Strategic Future is the report produced by our team. It assesses six core areas of Indian public diplomacy, and offers four strategic recommendations for the future.
On behalf of the India: Inside Out research team, I invite your comments, questions, and feedback.
By Maya Babla
In November 2010, President Obama said on his inaugural visit to New Delhi, “India is not simply emerging, it has emerged.” In many ways, of course, this is true. India endured the economic collapse with resiliency, hovering between seven and nine percent GDP growth in 2011; it is speculated that the country has a chance at permanent-member status on the United Nations Security Council; and with its young population, India is perfectly poised on a trajectory to world leadership. On the other hand, India still lags behind on several key human development indices, ranking 134 of 187 in the most recent UN report, a challenge compounded by rapid urbanization.
For all these reasons and complexities—and a few more—India makes for a fascinating case study in public diplomacy, and in December 2011, six of my colleagues and I journeyed to New Delhi, Vishakapatnam, and Mumbai with the goal of appraising India’s public diplomacy strategy. Over the course of two weeks, we met with Indian government and civil society leaders, explored the culture, and experienced the sights, sounds, and smells of two of India’s largest cities. And along the way, we shared our conversations with people from around the world through this website. Our key deliverable will be a report that summarized our findings in six key areas: government public diplomacy, development, urbanization, citizen diplomacy, media, and Indo-Arab relations. The report will be available on this site in the coming weeks.
In approaching this project, my core question was one that required reconciliation, rather than an answer. How can India boast such high levels of economic growth, yet sustain some of the worst rates of child malnutrition, poverty, and gender inequity in the developing world? It’s a question that media coverage of India is beginning to ask: http://www.newstatesman.com/asia/2012/01/pilger-india-land-advertising”>is India’s rise as a “new world power” both true and a “false reality”? Development was a key research area for us, and yielded a clear finding: Indians are hands-on when it comes to addressing the development challenges the country faces. They are engaged and invested in their own development, and this message was palpable in our conversations with a host of NGOs, social justice activists, and graduate students. Yet these groups may not be representative of all Indians; one of our Indian interviewees proposed that Indians’ “cultural tolerance of inequality is tremendous.”
Thus, while we found that India has a robust civil society that in many ways is filling in the gaps that the government cannot due to a shortage of manpower, the Government of India could be doing much more to engage its own citizens in development, and for that matter, in public diplomacy.
By seeing a large population as an opportunity—a strength to be leveraged—India would achieve both its internal and external public diplomacy objectives. In our conversation with Anita Rajan, who is a part of the office that advises the Prime Minister on the National Council on Skill Development (NCSD), she described India as being “on the brink,” and ready to excel in the next decade, provided that India’s youth population is equipped with the right skills. NCSD uses a public-private partnership model to provide vocational training, with the goal of skilling 500 million people by 2022, and these partnerships, it became clear, are paramount in enabling large-scale change.
We found that many Indians unknowingly act as citizen diplomats; take, for example, the leadership team at Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP), an organization that trains women community leaders—from entrepreneurs to lawyers—in conflict transformation. They take on the challenging process of tough relationships like Kashmir and Pakistan: areas many people cast aside as too touchy. One aspect of their programs is facilitating dialogue between these women leaders, the military, and government bureaucrats. WISCOMP’s approach is another model that can be replicated, and the more these types of collaborations happen, the closer India comes to achieving its public diplomacy objectives.
One challenge the Government of India will face along the way is the diluted citizen trustin its activities. A recent Times of India poll found that http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-01-25/india/30662530_1_biggest-threat-youth-power-cities”>60% of Indians feel that corruption is the country’s biggest weakness, up nearly 20% from a Hindu Times poll conducted in February 2011. This is a critical problem because if India is perceived as corrupt on international indices as well as amongst its own people, then her credibility is damaged, and her ability to conduct public diplomacy is diminished, if not demolished. The government gets this, as evidenced by the comprehensive e-governance plan produced under the leadership of Abhishek Singh in the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology. India’s e-governance initiatives are promising on two fronts: first, the plan is accelerating the rate at which rural India becomes Internet-connected, and further accelerates the debate India must now face over Internet freedom; second, India’s expertise in e-governance creates an opportunity to share its expertise with other countries facing similar issues.
India’s relationship with the Arab world was an interesting case study for understanding the country’s foreign relations, and where public diplomacy fits in—or doesn’t. On the surface, Indo-Arab relations can be characterized as a strong business partnership. Given the many cultural and religious ties and a large Indian diaspora community in many Gulf countries, not expanding on this is a missed opportunity. But what is more promising, and more quietly pursued, is India’s engagement with countries working to re-build their governments post-revolution; here, India can offer its expertise as the world’s largest democracy, which will perhaps be more warmly welcomed than the American variety.
It became clear to us that India has much to offer the world besides its economic prowess. Indians’ work towards solving their country’s challenges is promising; the next step for India is in leveraging both the work of government and Indian civil society to do international knowledge sharing and capacity building. In doing so, India will rightly find its role in world leadership.
This piece was originally published for the USC Center on Public Diplomacy’s December 2011/January 2012 issue of PDiN Monitor.
“India is a complex nation.” These are words I heard many times throughout my short two-week span in India, and after much reflection, I believe I may have finally gained a speck of clarity about what this statement means, and why it became a recurring theme in conversations about where India is today and where its future lies. I set out to examine the state of India’s urban issues; to determine whether the strength of the nation is stemming from its megacities, urban populations and local innovations. What I found is that identifying India’s strengths and weaknesses is a complex task, and often, they are one and the same.
In New Delhi, our team met with Harsh Mander with the Center for Equity Studies (CES). CES conducts research and advocacy for social and economic justice, and under their umbrella, the Dil Se campaign was established to provide services to street children in Delhi. After visiting a school for boys that was established as part of the Dil Se campaign, and hearing about the vast needs of urban children in Delhi and throughout India, it was obvious that great efforts are being taken to correct a growing problem that has left many children without proper education, health, and other basic needs and opportunities.
Dil Se Classroom - Photo by Anna Dawson
Our conversation with Mr. Mander revealed several things: collaboration with government on urban social issues is a must; societies must reclaim responsibility for their citizens; and populations must understand the issues that are common to us all in order to find solutions to the problems that unite us. Continue reading
By Jessica Castillo
LOS ANGELES – The world’s population is now 7 billion people…and counting. Out of 7 billion people, 1.2 billion are in India; about 22 million in Delhi and 20 million in Mumbai. 7 billion is indeed an incredible number to think about, in terms of resources, environment, and stabilization. But this incredible number of people on our planet should caution us to think now more than ever, about who those 7 billion are. Where do they live? What do they need? Who do they listen to, talk to and depend on?
My hypothesis is that trust has a key role to play in public diplomacy. I recently attended two conferences, one on U.S. -Mexico Border Issues and another on Crisis and Issues Communication Management. Though each focused on completely different issues, both seemed to refer heavily to the notion of trust: the need for a government to earn the trust of its citizens in order to find sustainable solutions to problems, and the need for businesses or organizations to earn the trust of its stakeholders in order to mitigate the often long-term devastating impact that crises can have on everyone involved. Trust is built up over time by demonstrating goodwill, communicating frequently to constituents, encouraging participation, and responding to feedback and suggestions. Once cultivated, a reservoir of goodwill and trust can be relied upon when that one incident, crisis, sudden problem (or unrelenting one) can test people’s buy-in and commitment to a certain business, NGO or government. The common thread in each conference and on each topic was the vitality of communicating to one’s stakeholders to generate a sense of buy-in, commitment and support in times of need.
If India’s public diplomacy mission includes a mandate to communicate with its own citizens as well as foreign publics, then it must be able to cultivate trust amongst Indians. Continue reading
By Jessica Castillo
LOS ANGELES – Some are calling it, ‘the great migration’, a ‘rural exodus’, or simply… ‘urbanization’. It is the movement of people around the world into urban centers that has both pros and cons and sparks a flurry of debate in favor and opposition of such movement. For many, this transition is a necessity. Rapid development and industrialization have forced the movement of populations into cities in an effort to replace the loss of rural occupations. For others, the transition offers new opportunities for business, education and eventual quality of life improvements. In India, this transformation is increasingly apparent as 2011 census data indicate that urban population has increased by 91 million. A BBC story in late September offered critique of this finding, pointing to the detrimental effects on India’s cities and the inability to cope with urban population demands. But what do these transitions really mean for India?
When I think of India, I think ‘vibrant’. I think ‘cultural’. I think ‘diverse’. While I am certain that I am not alone in my perceptions, there persists another set of assumptions about the nation. At last week’s Zocalo Public Square talk “Is India Rich or Poor?”, author Patrick French discussed these assumptions that often dominate the spectrum of foreign audiences’ knowledge of India: India is poor, spiritual, and continually associated with Pakistan. Other common negative ideas of India that emerged from the discussion are that it lacks infrastructure, and perpetuates class inequities. Where are these perceptions coming from? And why do they dominate the conversations surrounding an emerging market where the economy has seen such significant gains in the last decade?
