Abstract
With the emergence of new challenges the traditional approaches have now been taken over by the non-traditional ones. Either it is the hard power or soft power every state mobilizes it to achieve the strategic ends. This paper focuses on India’s soft power capabilities and its extensive use, particularly that of mass media for projecting country’s image as the world’s largest successful democracy and vocals of world peace. However, the employment of this strategic tool by India is not restricted to its image building but it is geared more on tarnishing the image of other countries particularly Pakistan. The paper further examines Indian media manipulation through ‘Liberal' lens, which is based on liberals view of ‘free media’ and ‘freedom of speech’ identify Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anti-Pakistan and Hindu nationalism agenda along with their negative framing of news contents targeting Pakistan. The key findings substantiate that India uses propaganda strategy against Pakistan, utilizing Sun Tzu and Kautilya’s deception and isolation concept in their foreign policy towards Pakistan. It verifies that comparing all previous governments, Modi ‘sarkar’ has extensively mobilized media as soft power for achieving its strategic objectives. Indian new strategy of using soft power is not effective and conducive for regional peace at the moment rather it has proved to be supplementing its already existing hard power rhetoric for its gluttony of regional supremacy. The Bharatya Janata Party’s (BJP) government seems to be adapting ‘Liberal’ approach, however, in practical terms the essence of ‘Realist’ sentiments are deeply engraved that would not be easy to root out. The paper concludes that BJP’s xenophobic rhetoric is pro-Hindu nationalism and anti-Pakistan. It uses media and other concepts of strategic philosophies as the soft power and employs it as a strategic weapon for attaining regional hegemony.
Keyword(s)
Soft Power, Freedom of Speech, Liberal Theory, Media Manipulation