Using varsities in India’s grand strategy as global power

Universities can contribute significantly to a state’s grand strategy: first, as centres of global academic networks, they provide opportunities to advance the state’s soft power influence. Second, with their scholarly engagements on international issues, they can provide expert inputs for developing a normatively sustainable state’s grand strategy. While India has to a certain extent utilised universities to advance its soft power influence, it has largely ignored their role in as far as providing crucial inputs is concerned.

Indian universities have attracted students from its neighbourhood and as far as Central Asia, South East Asia and Africa. The global recognition of its courses, use of English as a medium of instruction and affordable tuition fee has led India to be reckoned as a leading educational destination for students from developing countries.

Some alumni of Indian universities have gone on to serve as the heads of states of Afghanistan, Bhutan, Malawi, Myanmar, Nepal, Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania. These leaders have demonstrably taken a positive approach towards India, and relations with this country have thrived when they assume office.

Having international students in the Indian universities has therefore contributed in establishing stronger people-to-people, as well as state-to-state relations.

The Ministry of External Affairs has established Chairs of Indian Studies in various foreign universities. These chairs, while educating foreign students on Indian subjects, serve as a nucleus around which Indian studies could develop in academic institutions abroad.

However, it is often the MEA that has driven India’s engagements with foreign students and universities. Even in the deputation of Indian Chairs, which includes professors from Indian campuses, the universities have seldom been used as agents of promoting India’s soft power.

Moreover, despite a number of Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) signed between Indian and the foreign universities that seek to establish mutually beneficial relations, the net interaction between the students and faculty members with their foreign counterparts remains negligible.

India’s rise as a global player would require serious efforts in building its normative influence, and universities can be a significant source.

For that, it would require to raise the global standing of its universities, and increase the student outreach beyond India’s neighbourhood. China recognised the importance of this in the 1990s and launched Project 211 and Project 985 to improve the status of its universities and to attract international researchers and students.

While the Indian government has initiated a couple of efforts in this direction, such as the ‘Study in India’ programme (2019) and Institutions of Eminence (2016), the rankings of Indian universities in the top varsity lists has continued to drop. More systematic and concerted efforts are needed towards raising the standards of teaching and research.

Secondly, states often utilise universities for their expertise and knowledge they generate. The United States, for instance, has not only recruited prominent university faculty members such as Condoleezza Rice, McGeorge Bundy, Walter Rostow and Henry Kissinger for top diplomatic and advisory positions, but has also from time to time utilised scholarly ideas developed in the universities.

In India’s case, the often constricted focus of Social Sciences on inter-disciplinary dialogue and purpose has limited their utility in policymaking. Social Sciences departments need to further their engagements with the empirical realities by increasing their focus on policy-relevant research.

This can be done by opening channels of communication between Indian universities and various ministries that include forming expert networks, holding regular briefings, commissioning research to the universities and facilitating two-way secondments.

At present, the Indian government recruits only about a score of serving officers in the foreign service each year, and inducts limited non-official experts in its other research, outreach and advocacy programmes — a strength that remains significantly low when compared with other countries of similar size.

There is an urgent need to increase the strength of India’s diplomatic corps as well as experts involved in various track II diplomatic processes.

This change in approach will also contribute in professional training of the university pupils for such roles. Taken together, these steps would be crucial in sustaining India’s rise as a global player.

The author is with the Observer Research Foundation