Soft Power of India as a Sovereign State: Ideological Origins and Retrospective (Part I)
The article examines the role of "soft power" in the implementation of the Indian foreign policy - from 1947 (when it declared its independence from the British Empire) to the present day. The authors successively consider three periods in the development of Indian "soft power". The first one lasted from 1947 to 1964 and was characterized by framing foreign policy based mainly on "soft power"; during the second period (1964-1998), India actually discredited itself in terms of "soft power" due to its participation in a number of military conflicts with neighboring countries and conducting nuclear tests in 1998. In the third period (from 1998 to the present) the country's administration systematically attempts to incorporate "soft power" into Indian foreign policy without neglecting the accumulation of its "hard power". In addition, the article analyzes the ideological origins of India's "soft power" and modern trends of its political thought, which can be described in the categories of "soft", "hard" and "smart" powers. The authors conclude that within the last two decades, the political weight of supporters of the "smart" power as the basis of the Indian state policy has increased.