V-P Jagdeep Dhankhar calls for expanding country's soft power

New Delhi, July 10 (IANS) Describing enduring soft power as a potent resource in the modern-day world, Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar said on Thursday that India’s growth as a global power must be accompanied by the rise of its intellectual and cultural gravitas.

Addressing the inaugural session of the Annual Conference on Indian Knowledge System (IKS) in New Delhi, he said, “The strength of a nation lies in the originality of its thought, the timelessness of its values, and the resilience of its intellectual traditions.”

Reaffirming India’s identity beyond the confines of post-colonial constructs, the Vice-President observed, “India is not just a political construct formed in the mid-20th century. It is a civilizational continuum — a flowing river of consciousness, inquiry, and learning that has endured.”

He said, “India must not merely import global narratives. We do it thinking they are full of worth it. It must contribute to shaping them, and that can only happen when we build an ecosystem that values and rigorously studies our own traditions.”

For this, friends, we need universities like JNU to take the lead. You must be the laboratories of this great intellectual reinvigoration, he said.

The Vice President said, “You must create spaces where historians work alongside coders, Sanskritists alongside biologists, ethicists alongside engineers. This conference is a crucial step in building that ecosystem.”

Let us, therefore, turn our attention to tangible action. The creation of digitised repositories of classical Indian texts is an urgent priority, covering all classical languages such as Sanskrit, Tamil, Pali, and Prakrit, he said.

Dhankhar said, “These repositories should be made widely accessible, enabling scholars in India and researchers around the world to engage meaningfully with these sources.”

He said equally essential is the development of training programmes that empower young scholars with robust methodological tools — blending philology, computational analysis, ethnography, and comparative inquiry to deepen their engagement with Indian Knowledge Systems.

Pointing to the historical sidelining of indigenous wisdom, he said, “While indigenous insights were dismissed as relics of the primitive past, it was not an error of interpretation.”

“It was an architecture of erasure, destruction, and decimation. What is more tragic is that the selective remembrance continued even after Independence. Western constructs were paraded as universal truths. To put it more bluntly, untruth was camouflaged as truth,” he said.

--IANS

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