Explained: This article explains the political background, key decisions, and possible outcomes related to Explained : Three Sets of Recent Events Have Damaged India’s ‘Soft Power’ and Its Impact and why it matters right now.
The treatment of A.R. Rahman, the ICC behaving in tune with India’s ruling BJP’s politics and the slew of bans levelled on India’s films in many countries point to the shrinking of India’s powers to attract and persuade.
Recent developments in India have ensured that the country’s story of domestic polarisation and its bitter and divided discourse is spilling over globally. These incidents have damaged India’s soft power potential and are becoming increasingly hard to keep a secret.
The Global Soft Power Index offers a year-on-year measurement of 193 member states of the United Nations. In 2025, it found “a growing divergence in Soft Power potential between nations, with stronger nations advancing faster while weaker ones fall further behind.” IMF has started computing data across nations for ‘soft power’ since 2024.
The political scientist Joseph S. Nye (Junior) coined the phrase “soft power” in the late 1980s. It was meant to signal that battleships and soldiers alone did not add heft to how nations impacted others. Beyond flexing armed strength or economic muscle, nations have struck a chord and won influence in the world through the draw of their culture or aspects of their lifestyles. Think of K-pop in recent times and Hollywood, The Beatles, yoga and Japanese martial arts.
India does not figure prominently in global indices but in domestic understanding and certainly in the government’s projection, sees itself as mattering in terms of ‘soft power.’ Its music, food, plural ethos, yoga, meditation, “spirituality” and finally, Bollywood, are held up and promoted towards India’s global brand recognisability.
But three recent developments have shone the light on how what signalled its ‘soft power’ have been influenced by its domestic divisive politics. What were earlier its soft power markers are now capable of bringing ignominy to India.
Rahman’s ‘Maa tujhe salam’
Given the hold of India’s popular music globally, especially film music, A.R. Rahman is recognised internationally as one of India’s best-known ambassadors of soft power.
He transcends Indian borders and with six National Film Awards, two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, six Tamil Nadu State Film Awards, 15 Filmfare Awards, and 18 Filmfare Awards South, is almost representative of India’s film music.
In 2010, the Union government conferred him with the nation’s third-highest civilian award, the Padma Bhushan.
Other than Tamil and Hindi music, his forays in Hollywood have also led to him being exceptionally renowned.
Recent remarks – gently delivered comments in an interview to BBC Asian Network – about a darkening cloud over creativity in Mumbai, possible “communal” ideas finding takers, and also divisive films like Chhava ruling the roost, have resulted in the hounding of the music maestro. Trolls including Bharatiya Janata Party MPs and others openly sympathetic to the ruling BJP have cornered him on social media leading him to make a second public statement saying India is his home and inspiration, something which should never have been in doubt. That someone called Allah Rakha Rehman, who is one of the most powerful creative forces in Chennai and Mumbai cannot express himself, has cast a shroud over the idea of freedom of expression in India.
The International (or Indian?) Cricket Council
Cricket has increasingly been a source of asserting India’s ‘soft power’ in the world. It is the only team sport which has made India truly big on the world stage. India’s is the most moneyed and influential cricket board in the world. With the former BCCI chairman, also the son of the Union home minister Amit Shah having wrested control of the ICC, India’s domestic politics is now directly radiated on the cricket world stage.
The recent controversy over Bangladeshi star player, Mustafizur Rahman, and his expulsion from Shah Rukh Khan’s Kolkata Knight Riders, has resulted in worsening ties with Bangladesh’s Cricket Board, which wants to play in venues outside India. But the ICC has refused any relocation or accommodation. Bangladesh will now have to drop out.
This comes as India’s BJP leadership has soured the domestic atmosphere against Bangladesh with repeated poll campaigns around purportedly “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh in India. The killings of Hindu people in Bangladesh has also been made into a poll issue in Bengal, ahead of the elections.
The ICC’s apparent projection of India’s divisive politics will cost the country in terms of reputation as a reliable and no-fuss venue, aiming to host the Commonwealth Games and also dreaming of an Olympic bid for 2036 (both in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad).
There are several instances of countries refusing to play in certain other countries, and international boards making allowances for them. India itself has refused to play in Pakistan and matches were recently rearranged in venues in West Asia. But this move detracts from India’s hold over a significant piece of its ‘soft power’.
Indian cinemascope narrows
The recent film Dhurandhar, with a storyline consisting of an Indian spy in Pakistan recklessly winning over an all-evil Pakistan, had been banned in West Asia. Border 2, set to be released now, again with a strong anti-Pakistan overtone, has been banned in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE over its perceived ‘anti-Pakistan’ themes, as per Bollywood Hungama. The makers “did attempt to secure a release in the Gulf countries, but their efforts proved unsuccessful,” the report says. Sunny Deol’s Gadar 2 in 2023 was also banned here, as were Akshay Kumar’sSky Force and The Diplomat.
Indian films are perhaps among its most prominent ‘soft power export’ for decades now. Raj Kapoor’s brand recognition in the former Soviet Union, and Shah Rukh Khan’s fandom in Europe, US and Asia is legendary, for its accommodation of and its appeal for a multi-cultural world which mirrors the world’s diversity. With the palette of films made now shrinking to fit into a Hindutva nationalist imagination, its appeal globally is shrinking commensurately. The recent bans do not bode well for the brand equity of the previously universalist-themed idea of Indian cinema on the world stage.
Not only have these recent incidents damaged India’s soft power markers of popular music, cricket and cinema, but they have resulted in yielding negative dividends for India’s image abroad. The vehicles which earlier conveyed the story of an imperfect but robust attempt at accommodating diversity have ended up telling the world the story of the toxicity of social divides being encouraged by India’s ruling party’s domestic political agenda.
This article went live on January twenty-third, two thousand twenty six, at forty minutes past two in the afternoon.
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