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!
Importantly enough, PD isn’t just about the social media and posting a daily India File of videos. It’s also orchestrating unusual stuff like Amb. Kanwal Sibal charming a feisty Amritsar audience with his tongue firmly in cheek! Or finding Amb. HHS Viswanathana packed house in Ranchi. It’s about 'looking east’ from Shillong or bringing Nitish Kumar and Patna, face-to-face with Nepal.
But the biggest treasures, perhaps, lie in fertilising what innovative Indian heads of mission are doing in unsung lands.
Take Senegal. In three years, the Kirloskars have helped Senegal treble its rice production (and reduce its import bills). That message has followers now. Then former president APJ Abdul Kalam’s e-Network Initiative connecting Africa with fibre to benefit from Indian medicine and education or what our 1,000 (soon to be 1,600 ITEC experts) are doing, now have audiences across the social media. Staying a minute more on Africa, thousands of students have benefitted from Indian teachers, but unlike what the British do via the British Council and the Association of British Scholars, we often lose track of them. (Former Tanzanian president Salim Ahmed Salim read at St Stephen’s; former Nigerian president OlusegunObasanjo was trained by our army; and their late president Yar Adua once asked Manmohan Singh whether he was related to the Singh who taught him mathematics!). Social media is unlocking this goodwill.
Then there’s a wonderful initiative helping India win hearts in distant Buenos Aires even before they land at Delhi’s T-3. R Visvanathan, the Indian ambassador, and self-confessed lover of “samba and salsa, football and carnaval, tequila and caipirinha, copacabana and ipanema, cafezinho and cafecito, bossanova and boleros, tango and malbec,” offers “Visas with Coffee”! All you do is walk in with an Argentinian (or Uruguayan) passport and one Mr Batra at the mission will first offer you coffee (“or if you prefer... tea, chocolate or capuccino... and you browse through our wifi or flip through tourism books, your visa will be ready ... pronto..,” states the embassy’s website, www.indembarg.org.ar/en/visapas). Very un-Babu like, indeed!
These stories now have an audience thanks to PD. Internally, other missions are becoming eager to do better. The one in Sophia is screening Bollywood. Aptly so. As Suri muses, wan deploy Shahrukh Khan to Indonesia, and the venue was the steps of the Indian mission, there could be more goodwill for India than several years of hard diplomacy.
This stuff has the stamp of foreign secretary Nirupama Rao; once the popular spokesperson for her ministry and joint secretary (external publicity). Both Rao and Suri love technology and that’s helping the younger lot (and those young in ideas) to play to potential without fear of the IB. They have an ally in the PM’s Facebook page. They dare to “think Google”, they endorse Joseph Nye, have several young MPs as supporters. They remind us that China may have a $8.7 billion dollar budget on external publicity, but when Indians join forces, we do better.
