people politics policy performance

Digital Diplomacy Maine PR Kiya

Chomsky, Radia and a hope called new media

Diplomacy 2.0
Foreign ministry turns to social media for
Then there’s a wonderful initiative helping
India win hearts in distant Buenos Aires
even before they land at Delhi’s T-3. R
Visvanathan, the Indian ambassador, offers
Ashish Mehta

“Visas with Coffee”! All you do is walk in with
projecting India’s soft power an Argentinian (or Uruguayan) passport and
one Mr Batra at the mission will first offer
you coffee (“or if you prefer... tea, chocolate
or capuccino... and you browse through our
Rohit Bansal wifi or flip through tourism books, your visa
Diplomacy on the net
will be ready ... pronto..,” states the embassy’s
website)…
www.twitter.com/indiandiplomacy
are doing, now have audiences visa will be ready ... pronto..,”
F
or many, many of us, the nightmarish pic-
ture Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman
present in their book “Manufacturing Con-
sent” is a bit outlandish. They argue that many re-
spected and liberal news media organisations ac-
tually work in cahoots with corporates to control public opinion.
We think of our favourite newspaper (or news anchor) and their
scoops and stings and it is difficult to imagine anything other
than pure public interest behind them. Chomsky is certainly
overstating his case, as usual, you would think. Corporates, pol-
iticians and PR guys joining hands and manipulating the single
thing left in our hands, our opinions (that is to say, our votes):
that is something we can very well imagine in a dystopian nov-
el of the 1984 variety, it might be happening to a small degree
(paid publicity on page 3, for example), but democracy on the
whole is going strong, you would argue.
This perspective from Chomsky will help in navigating a few

T
he man may still
not be the foreign
office’s answer to
E Sreedharan. He
certainly deserves
the MVC for bravery. His mis-
sion is to do “strange” things
like listening and engaging
with people across the world.
Strange because most rational
diplomats would think Twitter,
Facebook and YouTube are ei-
ther for their kids or radioactive
no-brainers for trouble. Some
maintain discrete personal ac-
counts, but they often complain
of nerves, because the spooks
are tracking them; and, after all,
Shashi Tharoor, our folk hero in
the social media universe, owed
his trouble to his tweets.
Meet Navdeep Suri, 51, a
1983-batch diplomat, who since
July this year heads India’s pub-
lic diplomacy (PD) division, and
has opened a series of unprec-
edented direct messages with
ordinary John Does; not just on
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube,
but more niche forums like
Scribd and Issuu. Call it India’s
digital diplomacy, our long-de-
layed baby steps into the world
of soft power. And the world
is beginning to notice. Because
here (facebook/indianpublicdi-
plomacy.com; twitter/indian-
publicdiplo macy.com; youtube/
indianpublicdiplomacy.com)
tough questions aren’t ducked.
Nor are the questioners dubbed
“offensive” and blocked.
The really mad oddities are
sent a private reply on the lines
of, “sir, how would you yourself
like to solve this problem?” and
the borderline cases get chas-
tened, not by Suri or his team,
but by others on the forum, “in
a self-corrective sort of way.”
So, potentially, Suri and his
team are catalysts to India’s fu-
ture army of public diplomats!
Importantly enough, PD isn’t
just about the social media and
posting a daily India File of
videos. It’s also orchestrating
unusual stuff like ambassador
Kanwal Sibal charming a feisty
Amritsar audience with his
tongue firmly in cheek! Or find-
ing ambassador HHS Viswa-
nathan addressing a packed
Navdeep Suri, joint secretary
and head of the public diplo-
macy division
house in Ranchi. It’s about
‘looking east’ from Shillong or
bringing Nitish Kumar and Pat-
na face to face with Nepal.
Real treasures
But the biggest treasures, per-
haps, lie in fertilising what in-
novative Indian heads of mis-
sion are doing in unsung lands.
Take Senegal. In three years,
the Kirloskars have helped
Senegal treble its rice produc-
tion (and reduce its import
bills). That message has fol-
lowers now. Former president
APJ Abdul Kalam’s e-Network
Initiative connecting Afri-
ca with fibre to benefit from
Indian medicine and educa-
tion (http://indiandiplomacy.
across the social media.
www.youtube.com/indiandiplomacy Staying a minute more on
Africa, thousands of students
have benefitted from Indian
teachers, but unlike what the
www.indiandiplomacy.blogspot.com British do via the British Coun-
cil and the Association of British
Scholars, we often lose track of
them. (Former Tanzanian presi-
www.facebook.com/indiandiplomacy dent Salim Ahmed Salim read
at St Stephen’s; former Nigerian
president Olusegun Obasanjo
was trained by our army; and
www.indiandiplomacy.in
their late president Yar Adua
once asked Manmohan Singh
whether he was related to the
Also in the PD team Singh who taught him mathe-
matics!) Social media is unlock-
T N Anantha
ing this goodwill.
Krishna
Director Then there’s a wonderful ini-
tiative helping India win hearts
in distant Buenos Aires even
before they land at Delhi’s T-3.
R Visvanathan, the Indian am-
Anand
Khandelwal bassador, and self-confessed
OSD PD lover of “samba and salsa, foot-
ball and carnaval, tequila and
caipirinha, copacabana and ip-
anema, cafezinho and cafecito,
bossanova and boleros, tango
Abhay Kumar
and malbec,” offers “Visas with
Under
secretary Coffee”!
All you do is walk in with an
Argentinian (or Uruguayan)
passport and one Mr Batra at
the mission will first offer you
blogspot.com/2010/09/indias- coffee (“or if you prefer... tea,
engagement-with-resurgent- chocolate or capuccino... and
africa.html) or what our 1,000 you browse through our wifi or
(soon to be 1,600 ITEC experts) flip through tourism books, your
states the embassy’s website,
www.indembarg.org.ar/en/visa-
pass.htm, very un-babu-like.)
Bollywood
These stories now have an au-
dience thanks to PD. Internal-
ly, other missions are becom-
ing eager to do better. The one
in Sophia is screening Bolly-
wood. Aptly so. As Suri muses, if
we can deploy Shahrukh Khan
to Indonesia, and the venue is
the steps of the Indian mission,
there could be more goodwill
for India than several years of
hard diplomacy.
This stuff has the stamp of for-
eign secretary Nirupama Rao;
once the popular spokesperson
for her ministry and joint sec-
retary (external publicity). Both
Rao and Suri love technology
and that’s helping the younger
lot (and those young in ideas) to
play to potential without fear of
the IB. They have an ally in the
PM’s Facebook page. They dare
to “think Google”, they endorse
Joseph Nye, have several young
MPs as supporters. They remind
us that China may have a $8.7
billion dollar budget on external
publicity, but when Indians join
forces, we do better. n
Bansal is CEO and co-Founder
of India Strategy Group, Hammu-
rabi & Solomon Consulting.
rohitbansal@post.harvard.edu
grey zones when we debate the Niira Radia tapes. For example,
some say that Vir Sanghvi, Barkha Dutt and others were after all
merely discussing developments with a source. In the business
of news gathering, you have to deal with all sorts of people and
also keep the conversation going.
If you want to make sense of a court judgment on a very com-
plex issue you can consult an industry expert, or lawyer, or if you
are Vir Sanghvi, the Ambanis themselves. A PR executive is not a
source under any definition of that flexible term. Similarly, if you
want the latest info on cabinet formation, you can speak to party
spokespersons, possible candidates, or if you are Barkha Dutt,
Sonia Gandhi herself. What does a PR executive got to do with
it? Keep the above-mentioned perspective in mind and the an-
swers will show up by themselves.
Take another example. Why have all of the print and electronic
media players (except for the Outlook, Open, Mail Today and of
course Governance Now) refused to take note of it? In the last
few days, the newspapers have given us all details of a ‘royal’
wedding (with photographs), TV channels have debated the
proper timing of a certain kind of reality shows (with video clip-
pings), but not a word on the Radia Tapes. Why?
Prima facie, it would seem to any industry insider as well as
outsider, that the Indian media players prefer not to speak about
each other, no bitching, no praising the rivals/non-rivals. No giv-
ing credit, no blaming either. Remember the paid news contro-
versy? A majority of publications treated it as they would treat a
news item on a UFO sighting. Curiously, some of those few pub-
lications which took note of the paid news scandal have main-
tained a silence this time. Why?
You don’t need to read Chomsky to work out that if the lady rep-
resents three of the biggest corporate tycoons who are among
the biggest ad spenders, you don’t mess with her. What else
would explain the fact that while the old media is quiet, it is the
new media that is still debating the Radia aftermath. Blogs and
social media sites, which don’t depend on corporate ad spends,
have been able to say what the mainstream papers have shied
away from. Sitting here, that very much looks like a silver lining
in the proverbial dark clouds.

ashishm@governancenow.com
40 GovernanceNow | December 1-15, 2010 www.GovernanceNow.com 41