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India adopted soft power as an instrumental tool in its foreign policy approach long before the term was formally conceptualised and became an integral concept in the discipline of international politics in the late 1980s, when Joseph Nye first introduced it to explain the changing dynamics of American foreign policy. The persistence and success of the Non-Aligned Movement in providing an alternative to the power politics of the Cold War era, laid the foundation of India’s soft power. However, New Delhi’s policy towards its South Asian neighbours throughout the Cold War period was marked by a hard power approach driven by security considerations. Although Indian leaders have attempted to build trust and enhance cultural, economic and political interactions with neighbours, especially since the enunciation of the Gujral Doctrine, efforts at accumulating more hard power resources by following a course of multi-alignment at the global level have undercut its soft power resources in the region.
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