India’s multidimensional soft power in Mainland Southeast Asia under the Act East Policy

Abstract

Soft power is becoming a crucial aspect of modern diplomacy, especially in the case of emerging powers that are looking for expansion in their regions not through coercion, but through attraction, partnership and institutional engagement. India’s relations with Southeast Asia have often been studied in terms of cultural diplomacy, Buddhist diplomacy or economic collaboration, but these elements have been studied separately. This paper posits a multidimensional soft power prism to analyse India’s outreach to Mainland Southeast Asia under the Act East Policy where Buddhist diplomacy, educational exchanges, heritage conservation, tourism diplomacy, development partnership, digital public infrastructure (DPI) and high-level political diplomacy function as complementary tools of regional influence. The study adopts historical, descriptive and analytical research methods, drawing on primary and secondary sources and focusing on the five countries of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam and Thailand, to examine how these various dimensions have collectively influenced India’s regional engagement. The findings indicate that India’s comparative advantage is in a combination of civilisational legitimacy, institutional partnerships, governance innovation and development cooperation. Meanwhile, structural challenges, such as a lack of integrated institutional coordination, implementation hurdles and rising geopolitical pressures, still constrain cultural goodwill from being converted to lasting strategic impact.