Hard sell our soft power, prowess

'Soft power is our hard power.' This observation made by fashion designer-entrepreneur Sabyasachi Mukherjee at the ET World Leaders Forum on Saturday simultaneously addresses the elephant in the room and hits the nail on the head. This is not just a re-emphasis of our genius for craft and artisanship, but a clarion call to treat such 'soft power' on par with what has been usually trotted out as 'hard power'. In other words, making our unique positioning as makers of high-quality, high- value products a global signature, and putting as much muscle into their spread across the world as we do for oil and steel, digital, and telecom.

Mukherjee's message also takes on the challenge of moats being built around countries as part of trade policy (read: barriers). Being the source of high-end, lux products and services that only India can produce arms India with a monopoly that no trade tariff can block. In Mukherjee's words, people will buy them regardless of higher tariffs because they will want these products that no other country can produce. What applies to haute couture also applies to other 'soft' goods, whether it's the yet-to-be-properly-tapped video gaming, travel or food experiential landscapes.

Instead of only trying to get on the gravy train of various global supply chains, projecting India's soft power by means of tapping deep into our traditional strengths in high-end artisanship and craftsmanship can bring the kind of heft that, say, German precision toolmaking has, into high-end precision jewellery designing. Scalability comes automatically embedded in such a template. India should heed Mukherjee's call to dismantle the current binary of hard and soft power. Hard-selling the 'soft' stuff will take India to new places.