How India uses Public Diplomacy: Lessons for Pakistan

Ever since the existence of humankind people and individuals have been practicing and maintaining relations, alliances with each other even at the times of tribes, clans, and even in the very hostile war-like situations, people have kept their ties with one another. Messengers, envoys, diplomatic/political agents were first of their kind who conducted these jobs effectively for their states at the time when development was in its earliest development stages.

Although these practices now named as diplomatic practices were new at that time and unknown as well as compared to present world and the people of it. Public diplomacy is one of the most commonly known practices of today’s world. Instead of using violent means states now have started to adopt more peaceful approaches and policies to attain their national goals and needs more easily. This could be described as the further dimension of soft power because by practicing Public Diplomacy state can initiate their soft power policies and can achieve the desired outcomes by winning the hearts and minds of the foreign audience and non-governmental entities because by doing so it will enable government and decision making bodies of foreign states to act accordingly.

India being regional dominant power and emerging world power has invested its resources in public diplomacy, using traditional as well as new approaches to build its soft power. India and Pakistan both appeared on world map one after another, both have their own image in international system, however, India is trying to build up more and stronger diplomatic ties and public diplomacy to achieve its objective more easily than any other possible way, whereas, Pakistan has once in a while given importance to build its soft power and image of the nation.

India has tried to project soft power through cultural diplomacy, exchange programs, international broadcasting, and intellectual dialogues and through sports events. Meanwhile in Pakistan separate division of public diplomacy has been established under Ministry of Foreign Affairs but very less has been executed.

The culture of India is, however, one of the basic assets which they want to preserve and show to the rest of the world, therefore India is playing there cards brilliantly and by promoting their culture through media industry and festivals abroad it is gaining the attention of outside world that how rich it is in their culture and how strongly they want to preserve it. Similarly through sports events or leagues once in every year, it is inviting foreign players which ultimately show them how safer India is and how much welcoming they always are. In this way, India is reaching towards the foreign audience and spreading their message of being a peaceful state. Similarly, other approaches to Public Diplomacy are also followed by India to reach towards foreign Audience hence Pakistan should learn from its neighbor and do more efforts so as to exercise Public diplomacy.

Today India has a better international image than Pakistan because of their resource investment in public diplomacy. Pakistan needs to focus on public diplomacy in the current international arena, it will help in improving its bilateral relations with other states. To achieve political goals and national interests states opt for soft power rather than going towards hard powers, Pakistan needs to look up its soft power to get the attention of the world towards itself. Pakistan being a strong regional player in South Asia, needs more efforts to improve its soft power approaches to public diplomacy so that it could improve its image abroad. India has strong hard as well as soft power capabilities thus Pakistan should also take under consideration this relatively new concept of diplomacy and follow the suit and maintain a balance between both so as for the better projection in International system.

Nimrah Javed
Nimrah Javed
Student of Defense and Diplomatic Studies