Skip to main content

Modi and Soft Power


Joseph S Nye, American political scientist, mooted the concept of ‘soft power’ as a means of gaining ascendancy in the world.  Military and economy give a country its hard power.  Soft power is its ability to persuade other countries to want what it wants them to want.

Mr Modi is getting the support of many countries against Pakistan using persuasive tactics as well as realpolitik.  He is relying more on soft power and rightly so.  No one but perverted minds would want a war especially between India and Pakistan because such a war is most likely to escalate into a world war.

Soft power can be effective only when it rests solidly on the foundation of substantial hard power.  It is also related to culture and ideology.  The Western civilisation spread rapidly across the world because it was firmly established on a secure hard power foundation.  America was a practical El Dorado.

Russia’s communism crumpled when its hard power hit the dust.  Soft power becomes impotent without the material backing of hard power.  No culture, no ideology can survive without that simple, practical and material back-up of the hard power.

India is able to get at least the support of some countries against Pakistan because of its fairly good hard power.  Pakistan cannot challenge India at the same level because its hard power is much inferior.  And its soft power is backed not by the appropriate hard power but by criminal minds that call themselves religious people.  It is quite a different matter that the line which divides religion and criminality is very thin.  Have you ever wondered why the greatest saints were the foulest sinners before their conversion?

I think Mr Modi is leading India in the right direction as far as the Pak threat is concerned.

Source: Global Hunger Index

However, Mr Modi should not forget that India has serious internal issues.  Hunger is one. The Global Hunger Index puts India below Mali, Malawi, Uganda and even Vietnam. The Prime Minister should not ignore the ignominious conditions prevailing within the country while he is dealing with the nefarious neighbour.

Mr Modi declared in Feb this year that “the total revenue loss from incentives to corporate tax payers was over Rs 62,000 crore.”  Why should we keep on feeding the rich like this?  Why not make the rich care for the poor?  Why not make the Ambanis and Adanis sponsor some starving villages in the country?  We can honour them with Bharat Ratna or some such award for their humanitarian services later?  I hope Mr Modi will use his “soft power” for such “charity at home.”


Comments

  1. In India the gap between haves and have nots must be huge, even as we are going to celebrate the platinum jubilee of our independence after a few years.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. And that gap is a serious problem. Logically it can mean the extinction of a whole lot of people. Survival of the fittest will work.

      Delete
  2. Very thoughtful...... and I hope Modiji must have plans for the internal problems we are facing right now....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You can eliminate poverty by eliminating the poor. That's not a great plan.

      Delete
  3. नोटबंदी के बाद डिजिटल पेमेंट पर जोर, जानें क्या है डिजिटल पेमेंट
    Readmore Todaynews18.com https://goo.gl/BgzxC9

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...