Digital diplomacy – India’s foray into soft power on the web

Navdeep Suri, a senior MEA babu, brings Twitter back to the ministry

Rohit Bansal

The man may still not be the foreign office’s answer to E Sreedharan. He certainly deserves the MVC for bravery. His mission 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 either for their kids or radioactive no-brainers for trouble. Some maintain discrete personal accounts, 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 public diplomacy (PD) division, and has opened a series of unprecedented 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-delayed baby steps into the world of soft power. And the world is beginning to notice. Because here (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) 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 chastened, 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 future army of public diplomats!

(Rohit Bansal is CEO of India Strategy Group, Hammurabi & Solomon Consulting, an HBS alum, and a student of Indian governance.)

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