I would like to start by commending the MEA for holding an international seminar on this hitherto neglected subject. I once asked a distinguished senior diplomat what lay behind all the hostility I heard expressed towards the Government of India in a particular foreign country: were we not getting our message across, didn’t our critics understand what we were doing — was it ignorance or was it apathy? He replied: “I don’t know, and I don’t care”. It rather explains the Indian Government’s public diplomacy problem.

And yet we know that none of the Government’s goals can be met without the support of ordinary people around the world – the informed publics who sustain the political will of their governments. This is what makes public diplomacy necessary.

So what is public diplomacy? Our first challenge is definitional. I know that many communication experts in the West draw a distinction amongst the terms public diplomacy, public affairs and public relations. The US is the country where these three terms first came into official use. Simply put, from a US Government point of view, public diplomacy seeks to engage, inform and influence foreign publics in order to promote sympathy and goodwill for the US and for American policies; public affairs seeks to encourage domestic public understanding and support of US Government policies and activities; and public relations seeks to win the support of a target audience, domestic or foreign, for the work or objectives of a specific US organisation or project.

Though the Government of India does not use the term ‘public affairs’ at all, rarely admits to ‘public relations’ in its own dealings, and has only started speaking of ‘public diplomacy’ quite recently, the fact is that the Government engages in public diplomacy, public affairs and public relations all at the same time, every day.

It is the responsibility of any Government to seek to gain the support of people around the world, by reaching out to the public at large through the media, non-governmental organisations, and other institutions of civil society as well as, where feasible, directly to the public. While the Wikileaks scandal has demonstrated anew the importance of private diplomacy – the transmission of confidential communications between governments — public diplomacy consists of what Governments want the public to know and are prepared to say publicly.

Ultimately both public diplomacy and the more conventional kind have the same ultimate objective, which is to promote a country’s national interests, including the well-being and security of the people in whose name the Government concerned is acting. Public diplomacy, of course, is neither as old as Grotius, nor as new as 9/11, though both have shaped its practice. Some of you may know that the term was coined at my Alma Mater, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, in 1965, and it was during my time at Fletcher a decade later, in the midseventies, that I first came to study the subject at the Murrow Centre for Public Diplomacy.

US Experience

Un-named, and then named, public diplomacy was a keystone of US Cold War foreign policy from the 1950s into the 1980s — when Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Marti, WorldNet TV and USIA were treated as important elements of Washington’s strategic foreign policy mix. But before we hold the US up as an exemplar of how to get public diplomacy right, it is also important to recall that with the success of the Solidarity Movement in Poland, and the collapse first of the Berlin Wall and then of the Soviet bloc, the US Government interest in public diplomacy slumped, and this was inevitably followed by a reduction in resources — and even the abolition of USIA. It was only in the aftermath of 9/11 and the ongoing battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world, that we again witnessed a sudden renewal of interest in public diplomacy in the US.

India may have been slower to wake up to the potential of public diplomacy, but this conference is an encouraging indication of a new willingness in this country to seek to “influence public attitudes to the formation and execution of foreign policy” – to use the Fletcher School’s definition.

So public diplomacy is the framework of activities by which a government seeks to influence public attitudes with a view to ensuring that they become supportive of foreign policy and national interests. It differs from traditional diplomacy in that public diplomacy goes beyond governments and engages primarily with the general public. In India, at least the way the MEA uses the term ‘public diplomacy’ embraces both external and domestic publics; that is what Americans would call ‘public diplomacy’ and ‘public affairs’. I think this is fine, since it is clear that in today’s world you cannot meaningfully confine your public diplomacy to foreign publics alone; in the current media environment, whatever message any Government puts out is also instantly available to its domestic audience on the Internet.

Right to Information

Public diplomacy is not just about communicating your point of view or putting out propaganda. It is also about listening. It rests on the recognition that the public is entitled to be informed about what a government is doing in international affairs, and is also entitled to responsiveness from those in authority to their concerns on foreign policy.

Successful public diplomacy involves an active engagement with the public in a manner that builds, over a period of time, a relationship of trust and credibility. Effective public diplomacy is sometimes overtly conducted by governments but sometimes seemingly without direct government involvement, presenting, for instance, many differing views of private individuals and organisations in addition to official Government positions.

Public diplomacy should also recognise that in our information-saturated world of today, the public also has access to information and insights from a wide and rapidly growing array of sources. This means that government information must be packaged and presented attractively and issued in a timely fashion if it is to stand up against competing streams of information, including from critics and rivals of the government. Your public diplomacy is no longer conducted in a vacuum; you are also up against the public diplomacy of other countries, sometimes on the very same issues. This is all the more so in the era of the Internet.

Web and Social Media

How does information reach people, particularly young people, today? In recent years, the emergence of Web 2.0 tools and social media sites like Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr – to name just a few of the more popular ones — offer governments a new possibility not only to disseminate information efficiently through these channels but also to receive feedback and respond to concerns. Countries like US, UK and Canada consider Web 2.0 a boon for their public diplomacy and have been quick to embrace and deploy a wide array of internet tools. They also pro-actively encourage their diplomats to blog so that they can populate the discussion forums with sympathetic points of view. In doing so, they are acutely aware of the effectiveness with which terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and many other militant organisations have harnessed the full power of Web 2.0 tools to propagate their message.

I believe the MEA has begun to do well to rise to this challenge. The MEA is on Twitter and Facebook, though the extent to which transparency is encouraged remains quite limited. But the very fact that the Public Diplomacy Division has gone beyond seminars in Delhi, and the production of coffee table books, documentaries, and the India Perspectives magazine, is welcome. In my brief stint as Minister I used to argue that foreign policy is too important to be left to the MEA alone. The nation needs an informed and engaged citizenry to face up to the responsibilities of being a global player in the 21st century. This is why I applauded the valuable nationwide lecture series conducted by the Public Diplomacy Division. Even better is the Government’s willingness, however tentative this may be, to start using Web 2.0 tools. A lively and candid presence on the Internet will have the impact of a force multiplier in terms of the efficacy of our outreach efforts, far in excess of the current reach of the relatively anodyne press releases and statements the Government puts out every day.

But there is a long way to go, and it would be idle to pretend there isn’t resistance, both from traditionalists and on grounds of security risks. But we can be encouraged, perhaps, by the fact that the practice is spreading, and that governmental organisations ranging from the Indian Post Office and the Delhi Police to the Pune city council, have started to make full use of the possibilities offered by the new social media tools. They are receiving a positive response to such initiatives.

There is no good reason why an IT powerhouse like India should not be in the forefront of public diplomacy efforts using 21st century technologies and communications practices. Not to deploy social media tools effectively is to abdicate a channel of contact not only with the millions of young Indians who use Facebook, Twitter and Orkut, but also to the huge Indian diaspora that tends to have such an active presence on the net on Indian issues and in turn wields a disproportionate influence on international perceptions of India. To place matters in perspective, Facebook alone currently has close to 500 million subscribers and a unique ability to disseminate information virally among its system and beyond through its networks of friends, fans and those who share their information.

Obama as Example

When President Obama delivered his famous Africa address in Ghana, the State Department deployed a full range of digital tools and some 250,000 Africans posed questions or made comments on the address – and most received responses from dedicated staff assigned to respond!

So much for what public diplomacy is and why it is needed and how it can be deployed. The one issue that remains, though, is the substance of the message. A bad decision or a weak policy can rarely be salvaged by good public diplomacy alone. ‘Incredible India’ is a great campaign for the Department of Tourism, but in public diplomacy what you need is Credible India. There is a need for a positive and forward-looking strategy that projects a vision of India in the world that helps define and shape what is increasingly being called Brand India. That’s where India’s soft power comes in.