Portland Communications, ComRes and Facebook have released the “world’s most comprehensive and accurate index of soft power to date”.
The United Kingdom tops the index and China comes in, just under the wire, at number 30.
India didn’t make the cut. And we aren’t very pleased with this. This is why.
Some of the countries that did make it include Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Norway and the Czech Republic.
The report says that it drew its sub-indices from three soft power pillars – political values, culture and foreign policy. Now, of course, the research is backed by solid scientific reasoning. But any layperson would ask, why didn’t any South Asian country make it to the list?
India is the world’s largest democracy. PM Modi is making waves internationally with his foreign policy agenda. And culture? India’s got International Yoga Day and words like pyjama, bungalow, pundit, shampoo, avatar to it’s credit. And let’s not even get started on Bollywood and cricket.
Also, maybe we should point out that Portland Communications and ComRes are based in the United Kingdom. Facebook, of course, is in the USA, which came in at number 3.
The Index also accounts for international polling data from 7,250 people across 20 countries. 2500 of this number were from Europe, Asia came in second with 1750 polled.
The highest number of countries polled were from Europe - 6. There were 5 from Asia, 3 from Latin America, 2 each from Sub-Saharan Africa and West Asia and North Africa, one from North America and Australia.18 of the 30 nations in the Index are European.
Seems a bit eurocentric, no?
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