So far Bollywood has more admirers than the Terracotta Army - but for how long?

The exercise of 'hard power' - military muscle and economic might - in the 21st century increasingly carries the threat of global disapproval, while the use of 'soft power' lends itself more easily to the Information Age and is becoming a more important asset. China and India appear to be learning this lesson in different ways.

Soft power is not about conquering others, but about being yourself; projecting your cultural values on to the global consciousness, either deliberately through the conscious cultivation of foreign publics, or unwittingly through perceptions that emerge from the global mass media.

India has been reluctant to devise a strategy based on hard power; there is a sense in which most Indians still think that would be unseemly. This helps to explain India's growing consciousness of its soft power - the aspects of Indian society, culture and political values that the world finds attractive. These assets may not directly persuade others to support India, but they enhance its standing in the world's eyes.

The roots of India's soft power run deep. India's is a civilization that over millennia has offered refuge and religious and cultural freedom to Jews, Parsis, several varieties of Christians, and Muslims. We are a land of rich diversities: I have often observed that we are all minorities in India.

This land imposes no narrow conformities on its citizens: you can be many things and one thing. You can be a good Muslim, a good Keralite and a good Indian all at once. So the idea of India is of one land embracing many. It is the idea that a nation may endure differences of caste, creed, colour, culture, cuisine, conviction, costume and custom, and still rally around a democratic consensus. That consensus is around the simple principle that in a democracy you don't really need to agree - except on the ground rules of how you will disagree. One of India's perceived strengths is that it has survived , despite so many predictions of its imminent disintegration, by maintaining consensus on how to manage without consensus.

India's effulgent culture is another price-less asset. Bollywood has brought its brand of glitzy entertainment not just to the Indian diaspora in the United States and Britain but to the world. I have lost count of the number of African officials and even heads of state who have mentioned to me their pleasure at growing up watching Indian films. A Senegalese friend told me of his illiterate mother who takes a bus to Dakar each month to watch a Bollywood film - she doesn't follow the Hindi dialogue and can't read the French subtitles, but these films are made to be understood despite such handicaps. People like her look at India with stars in their eyes as a result.

In Afghanistan, India's biggest national asset has been the popularity of its soap operas, dubbed into Dari on Afghan TV.

Indian restaurants have become to the world what Chinese laundries were in the US at the turn of the previous century. In England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding industries combined.

India benefits from the future and the past - from the international appeal of its traditional practices such as ayurveda and yoga, and the transformed image of the country created by its thriving diaspora. The old stereotype of Indians as snake-charmers or fakirs lying on beds of nails has been replaced with images of software gurus and computer geeks.

Joseph Nye, who developed the concept of soft power, has argued that in the Information Age it is often the side which has the better story that wins. India has become the 'land of the better story'. It is a society with a free press, thriving mass media and a people with the creative energy to dazzle.

A nation's soft power emerges from the world's perceptions of what that country is all about. Hard power is exercised; soft power is evoked. For soft power is not just what we can deliberately and consciously exhibit; it is rather how others see what we are, whether or not we are trying to show it to the world.

To take a political example: the sight in May 2004, after the world's then-largest democratic exercise, of a victorious leader of Roman Catholic background and Italian heritage (Sonia Gandhi) making way for a Sikh (Manmohan Singh) to be sworn in as Prime Minister by a Muslim (President Abdul Kalam), in a country 81 per cent Hindu, caught the world's imagination and won its admiration. This had nothing to do with external messaging: it was simply India being itself.

The opposite is true of China. Beijing's performance in the soft-power arena has been revealing. Borrowing a leaf from the Alliance Française, China has started establishing Confucius Institutes to promote Chinese culture internationally. Since 2004, it has already established 350 of them at universities across to the world, with 260 more in the pipeline. To these Confucius Institutes it has added 430 'classrooms' affiliated with secondary schools in 103 countries. According to Chinese Education Ministry figures, 7,000 teachers are recruited each year from Chinese universities and sent abroad to teach Chinese for two-year stints. Some 100 million foreigners are currently learning Mandarin, according to Chinese estimates.

The Beijing Olympics of 2008 were a brilliantly executed exercise in soft-power building by an authoritarian state. At the same time, the limitations of government propaganda were apparent when, during the first week of the Games, video footage of shootings and bomb attacks involving Uighur separatists appeared in the world media despite Beijing's denials.

It is also true that China's extensive outreach is not matched by commensurate benefits in terms of goodwill because its culture is being projected by an authoritarian state that restricts freedom of expression. As Nye observed in The New York Times: 'The 2008 Olympics were a success, but shortly afterwards, China's domestic crackdown in Tibet and Xinjiang, and on human rights activists, undercut its soft power gains. The Shanghai Expo was also a great success, but was overshadowed by the jailing of the dissedent Liu Xiaobo, who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and the artist Ai Weiwei. And for all the efforts to turn Xinhua and China Central Television into competitors for CNN and the BBC, there is little international audience for brittle propaganda. What China seems not to appreciate is that using culture to create soft power is not easy when they are inconsistent with domestic realities.'

Soft power sits ill with heavy-handed, top-down rule. China has paid particular attention to censoring the internet, employing 40,000 cyber police to monitor blogging sites and close any that get out of line. Twitter is blocked. When a US-based Chinese-language site called for a Jasmine Revolution in China, the Great Firewall of China blocked all searches for the word 'jasmine', even if you were merely looking for jasmine tea. Clearly, the authoritarians in Beijing are aware of the enormous potential of social media but their reaction has been to confront rather than cultivate it.

The scandal over the blind social activist Chen Guangchen and revelations about Bo Xilai, the former party chief in Chongqing, have also undermined China's image. Bo stands accused of terrorising his municipality and plotting to kill his police chief while his wife is a suspect in the murder of a British business associate. Chen's persecution by the authorities, angered by his campaigns against forced abortions and sterilizations, attracted worldwide condemnation. Both cases have challenged the narrative so assiduously promoted by Beijing of a smooth-running, technocratic and well-ordered nation. Instead, in the words of the analyst Michael Fullilove, they reveal 'the feebleness of China's rule of law, the tensions between the centre of power and the periphery, and the abuses that can be a part of Chinese life.' Such stories of corruption, misgovernance and human rights abuse damage China's efforts to portray itself as an admirable society. Autocracies rarely enjoy much soft power.

India, of course, suffers negatives as well: its pervasive corruption and its inefficiency at pulling its people out of poverty are well known. But because India does not pretend to be a super-efficient society, it transcends these failures. India muddles through.

Hard power without soft power stirs up resentment; soft power without hard power is a confession of weakness. Yet hard power tends to work better domestically than internationally: an autocratic state is not concerned about having a 'better story' to tell its own people, but without one, it has little with which to purchase the goodwill of the rest of the world. Whether it is the Chinese in Tibet or the Russians in Georgia, it can in each case be said that a major military power won the hard-power battle and lost the soft-power war.

By contrast, Indian soft power emerges despite the government: official backing for the dissemination of culture has been bureaucratic. So far, India's soft-power strategic advantages - goodwill for the country among African, Arab and Afghan publics, for instance - have been largely unplanned. International goodwill has not been systematically harnessed as a strategic asset by New Delhi. It is ironic that in and around the 2008 Olympics, authoritarian China showed a greater determination to use its hard-power strengths to cultivate a soft-power strategy for itself on the world stage. India will not need to try as hard, but it will need to do more than it currently does if it wants to turn its soft-power gains into an instrument of its global strategy.

(Shashi Tharoor is a member of the Indian parliament and former under secretary-general of the United Nations.)

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