A few years ago, ‘women empowerment’ showed up in foreign policy speeches mostly as a footnote — the paragraph you added to sound progressive before moving on to trade and security. That has changed. Countries treat gender equality as an instrument of influence, not just an internal virtue. It is now much more visible for us, as how India has started talking about the visible shift on the world stage.
As Joseph Nye defined it, soft power, is the ability to get what you want or influence directly through attraction rather than coercion or inducements. Gender equality fits that logic well because it works on four fronts at once — education, women’s rights, development cooperation, and reputation. A country that gets these right does not need to persuade anyone of its values — the results do the talking.
Education is where it starts. Sweden, Canada, France, and Germany have all used girls’ education and scholarship diplomacy, banking on a simple truth — students remember who paid for their degree, long after they have gone home and taken up positions of influence (ICRW, 2019). India has been playing this game for longer than most people may realize. Since 1964, the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme, has trained nearly 200,000 professionals from far more than 160 countries — a great many of them women — in a vary of fields ranging from agriculture to cybersecurity. There are no ribbon cuttings for this kind of work — it is slow, unglamorous, and quiet diplomacy. The kind of diplomacy that pays off decades later when someone once sat in an Indian classroom is now running a ministry, or a military, somewhere else in the world.
Women’s rights is the tricker front, because unlike education, you cannot fake it with a scholarship programme — the numbers eventually catch up with the narrative. India passed the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam in 2023, reserving a third of seats in Parliament and state assemblies for women, a genuinely significant constitutional step. But India also slipped to the 131st out of 148 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025, with women’s representation in Parliament actually falling to a 13.8% and ministerial representation to a 5.6% (WEF, 2025). The one bright spot is education — India scores 97.1% on educational attainment in the same report. So, the country has real material to work with, but the political empowerment gap undercuts the story it wants to tell.
Development cooperation is where India has been most consistent. The country’s 2023 G20 presidency deliberately reframed the conversation from ‘women’s development’ to ‘women-led development’ — a subtle but pointed shift suggesting women as agents rather than beneficiaries of policy. The New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration formally absorbed this language, meaning it now sits in a document signed by every major economy. That is not nothing — it is India setting vocabulary for the rest of the world’s development agencies to use.
Reputation is the payoff, or the risk, depending on how the other three hold up. Brand Finance’s Global Soft Power Index 2025 ranks India 30th overall, with string scores in future growth potential (3rd) and culture, but a weaker 28th in diplomatic influence. Gender equality sits quietly inside that diplomatic influence score — it is a part of what other governments and publics are silently judging when they decide whether to take India’s Vishwaguru (world teacher) framing seriously.
This is really the crux of India’s global aspirations. India wants a permanent UN Security Council seat, wants to lead the Global South, and wants to be seen as a democratic counterweight to China’s model of development financing. All of that rests partly on moral credibility, and moral credibility on the world state is, increasingly, gender credibility. Sweden built an entire ‘feminist foreign policy’ brand around this idea, even if it later walked it back under political pressure — proof that the strategy works, but also that it needs sustained follow through, not just good years.
India’s advantage is scale and story — a country of 1.4 billion people using scholarships, G20 chairmanship, and constitutional reform to project a genuinely distinctive model. Its vulnerability is the gap between what it says in Delhi and Geneva and what the WEF numbers show at home. Soft power built on contradiction does not collapse overnight, but it does erode — quietly, the same way it was built.
If India wants gender equality to be a lasting strategic asset rather than a talking point, the fix is not a new slogan. It is closing the distance between the G20 declaration and the next Gender Gap Report.
References
- Global Gender Gap Report 2025
- Global Soft Power Index 2025: The shifting balance of global Soft Power
- Press Information Bureau, Government of India, G20 New Delhi Leaders’ Declaration and Women-Led Development
- Women-led Development – India’s Opportunity at G20
- The ORF Gender Compendium: India’s G20 Presidency and Women-Led Development
- Defining Feminist Foreign Policy
- Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam comes into force
- Sweden, NATO and the gendered silencing of feminist foreign policy
