Recasting The Indosphere: Indic Strategy For Sinic Challenge

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The existence of the Indosphere in the Southeast Asia region is an acknowledged fact. Historically, the region's indigenous communities, from the mainland to the archipelagos, embraced Indic civilization as against the Sinic influence from close proximity. The cultural interactions ruptured when mother country India was reeling under foreign invasions. Time has come to revive this civilizational bond and recast its related approach, bearing in mind the inevitable and persistent clash of civilizations-Indic versus Sinic-underlying the realities of modern geopolitics. Framework for wielding and leveraging soft power capital, a challenge in itself, will have to be highly nuanced, using public diplomacy tools extensively. That will play a crucial geostrategic role in the near future on this eastern flank of the Indo-Pacific.

Pulind Samant is Mumbai born (1967), post-graduate in 'Labour Studies' (1990) from the University of Mumbai. He is currently pursuing Ph.D. research in the subject of International Relations, at an affiliated centre of the University of Mumbai. His topic of research pertains to the civilisational bond between India and Southeast Asia in general and Indonesia in particular.

He is a blogger, a columnist and a professional translator. He was on the panel of 'Marathi Vishwakosh Nirmiti Mandal' (Marathi Encyclopaedia producing body), Govt. of Maharashtra, in the subject of International Relations (2019). He presented papers in national seminars (2019 and 2023), sponsored by the Ministry of External Affairs, and published an article, 'Indic Perspective of the 2020 Pro- democracy Agitation in Thailand', in international journal 'Asian Review' (2021). His Marathi translation of Rajiv Malhotra's seminal work 'Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism' was published in June 2023. He is a visiting faculty at Indian Institute of Democratic Leadership (IIDL).

He has had a successful corporate career spanning 27 years (1990-2017) previously, as a Human Resource Management professional, having worked with a number of reputed Indian companies and MNCs. He is well travelled in India and overseas.

Policymakers in India use for substantiation of their views those policy analysts who are in broad agreement with their known views on the subjects being dissected in the making of policy. Just as Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru took care to gather around him 'for advice' only those who were in synchronicity with his views, modern framers of policy pass off their use of the 90-degree option of relying only on particular streams of thought as '360-degree consultation'. It is not surprising that so many of the policies adopted in India have proved to be less than optimal. Consultation gets carried out within a limited funnel of participants in the thought process, with the same individuals taking different roles at various points in time: close confidants one time, not trusted or taken seriously the other. Pulind Samant's work on the Indosphere shows the opportunity cost to the nation across the decades of not involving original minds in policy formulation. His assessments are a significant and correct departure from the well-trodden track of colonial scholarship designed to prevent the people of India from reaching the levels of self-empowerment and inner confidence needed to make breakthroughs in various fields that would cumulatively lead to the emergence of India as the third superpower of the globe, after the US and China.