India's Soft Power Deficit: What New Delhi Can Learn From the Cultural Diplomacy Playbook

India has cultivated significant cultural assets globally, but converting them into geopolitical leverage remains a stubborn challenge. A new analysis from former diplomat Aftab Seth argues the gap is not resources — it is strategy. His book, reviewed by The Indian Express on 3 May 2026, makes the case that New Delhi has chronically underperformed in the deliberate deployment of soft power, leaving substantial ground unclaimed even as China and the Gulf states pour resources into equivalent programs.

The distinction matters. Soft power — the ability to shape preferences and outcomes through attraction rather than coercion — is distinct from the broad cultural presence that a country may naturally accumulate. India has both: a diaspora spanning six continents, a cinema tradition with genuine global reach, an ancient religious and philosophical export that generates fascination in Western capitals, and a democratic identity that carries weight in the global North. Yet the strategic conversion of those assets into diplomatic capital has been inconsistent at best. Seth's thesis, as outlined in the Indian Express review, is that without a coherent state-level architecture to amplify and direct these resources, India leaves its advantages on the table.

What the Current Architecture Actually Does

India's soft power apparatus is not absent — it is fragmented. The Ministry of External Affairs oversees cultural diplomacy through the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, which operates cultural centres in some forty countries. The Indian diaspora itself functions as an informal transmission belt for Indian values and interests, though this operates largely without direct state coordination. Yoga Day, celebrated globally since the United Nations resolution in 2015, represents perhaps the most coherent instance of New Delhi deliberately using a cultural marker for diplomatic purposes — an annual event that generates goodwill across governments and civil societies simultaneously.

But the comparison to peer competitors reveals the gap. China's Confucius Institutes, despite political controversies, placed Chinese language and culture promotion inside hundreds of university campuses worldwide before Western governments began restricting them. The UAE's soft power strategy — anchored by institutions like the Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque — transformed a relatively young state into a cultural destination with measurable diplomatic returns. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 includes a heavy cultural investment track designed to reposition the kingdom beyond its hydrocarbon identity. India has not built anything of equivalent institutional weight or strategic coherence.

The Strategy Deficit Argument

Seth's critique, as presented in the Indian Express coverage, is fundamentally an institutional one. The book argues that Indian cultural diplomacy suffers from a diffusion of authority — too many agencies with overlapping mandates, insufficient coordination between the cultural ministry and the foreign service, and a tendency to treat cultural presence as an outcome rather than a goal to be actively pursued. The result is that India's cultural assets are largely deployed incidentally, through the organic spread of Bollywood or the diaspora's economic activity, rather than through deliberate, timed, and strategically sequenced initiatives designed to produce specific diplomatic outcomes.

This is not merely an academic observation. The geopolitical context makes the problem more pressing. As great-power competition intensifies across the Indo-Pacific, as the Gulf becomes an arena of competing influence campaigns, and as Africa emerges as a theatre where multiple states seek to expand their footprint, the absence of a coordinated Indian soft power strategy has concrete consequences. Countries that might naturally align with India's democratic and pluralistic values are courted by other powers with more structured offers — infrastructure, cultural institutions, media partnerships, scholarships, and diplomatic side-dishes that come attached to strategic packaging.

Why This Matters for New Delhi's Global Ambitions

The stakes are not abstract. India has articulated ambitions of great-power status — a permanent seat on a restructured United Nations Security Council, a leadership role in the Non-Aligned Movement recalibrated for the current era, and a central position in supply chain architectures that the West is actively building to diversify away from China. Those ambitions require diplomatic capital that soft power generates. A country that is genuinely admired, that is perceived as culturally rich and intellectually compelling, that generates goodwill across societies rather than merely governments, finds it easier to recruit partners, negotiate favourable terms, and attract investment on its own terms rather than on those of a more advanced power.

India's democratic identity gives it structural advantages that authoritarian competitors lack — cultural exports from a democracy tend to carry legitimacy that state-scripted cultural promotion cannot replicate. Bollywood's global reach, for instance, is organic and commercially driven, which makes it more credible as a vehicle for Indian soft power than a state-funded film initiative would be. The diaspora's economic integration into host-country economies creates stakeholding networks that reinforce Indian interests without requiring explicit lobbying. These are significant advantages that China, for all its institutional investment, cannot easily replicate through its state-directed cultural apparatus.

The challenge is sequencing. Seth's argument implies that India's cultural assets are currently under-leveraged not because they are insufficient but because they lack the institutional architecture to be deployed with purpose. Building that architecture — a coherent soft power strategy with clear objectives, coordinated agencies, measurable benchmarks, and diplomatic timelines — is a governance challenge as much as a financial one. The resources, as the Indian Express review suggests, are largely in place. The question is whether the political will and institutional design to activate them follows.

Forward View: What Would Closing the Gap Require

Several structural changes would need to accompany any serious Indian soft power push. Coordination between the cultural relations council, the external affairs ministry, and Trade and Investment promotion bodies would need to be more than ceremonial — it would need to produce joint initiatives with specific diplomatic objectives attached. The diaspora, currently an informal asset, could be better integrated into strategic communication efforts through institutional linkages that amplify Indian positions without appearing to be state-directed. Partnerships with foreign universities, media organisations, and civil society groups — built on the model that China pursued before it became politically toxic — could provide infrastructure for Indian cultural presence before the geopolitical window closes.

None of this is guaranteed. Soft power operates on long time horizons, and institutional change in New Delhi has historically moved slowly. But the competitive environment is accelerating. Gulf states are investing in cultural empires with state funds and strategic patience. China's cultural diplomacy, while constrained in Western contexts, is expanding into Africa and Southeast Asia with infrastructure-and-culture捆绑 deals that India has not yet learned to match. India's window to build a credible soft power architecture before the Indo-Pacific's influence architecture solidifies is not unlimited.

Seth's book, whatever its specific prescriptions, arrives at a moment when the question has practical urgency. India's cultural inheritance is genuinely extraordinary — that is not in dispute. The question is whether the inheritor treats it as a passive endowment or an active instrument.

This publication framed the India soft power story as an institutional design problem rather than a resource problem — the dominant wire framing tended to treat cultural diplomacy as a background feature of Indian foreign policy rather than a strategic gap requiring deliberate correction.