Branding India—a Public-Private Partnership

Abstract

Bollywood is undoubtedly the most visible manifestation of India’s “global popular” brand, as noted in the last chapter. In a postmodern, image-saturated world branding is considered an effective means to promote a country’s soft power (Anholt, 2007; Aronczyk, 2008; Van Ham, 2008; Marat, 2009; Lee, A. L., 2010; Kaneva, 2011). India can draw upon a range of other, equally strong nation-branding attributes. Other components of India’s national brand include “the world’s largest democracy,” Gandhi as an iconic figure of peace and nonviolence, yoga and spiritualism—not unrelated in increasingly materialistic and atomized societies, as well as cricket, fashion, food and festivities. As Tharoor has noted: “A country’s brand is judged by the soft power elements it projects on to the global consciousness, either deliberately (through the export of cultural products, the cultivation of foreign publics or even international propaganda) or unwittingly (through the ways in which it’s perceived as a result of news stories in the global mass media” (Tharoor, 2012: 312). The focus of this chapter is on how the Indian corporate elite and political establishment have joined forces in recent years to devise and develop a brand India to “sell” it as a favored tourism and investment destination. Such framing of India’s soft power is analyzed and its growing privatization critiqued.