India – Turkey Relations

What is the issue?

Recently, the Turkish President Erdogan visited India. The dialogue between the Indian PM and the Turkish President is hopefully the first step in the long road towards a more productive partnership.

India-Turkey on global issues:

• The Turkish establishment’s uncritical embrace of Pakistan has been unchanging, irrespective of who dominated Ankara — the secular army or the current Islamist leadership.
• On global issues, India was non-aligned and Turkey, a member of the Western Cold War alliances.
• Turkey was also part of a regional military bloc — the Baghdad Pact — that Great Britain stitched together in the early 1950s with Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan.
• On regional issues, Turkey tilted to Pakistan on the Kashmir question, and India moved closer to Nicosia in Turkey’s dispute with Cyprus.

How well was India’s relationship in the past?

• The friendship treaty with Turkey that Jawaharlal Nehru signed in 1951 underlined India’s hopes for building a lasting partnership in the post-colonial era.
• It is not that there were no major Indian efforts after Nehru.
• Two strong prime ministers, Rajiv Gandhi and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, tried to end the stalemate in relations with Turkey, but did not succeed.

What is Turkey’s view on India?

• Erdogan called for a de-escalation of the Kashmir violence and urged India to embark on dialogue with Pakistan to resolve the long-standing dispute.
• He also affirmed that Turkey would like to see both India and Pakistan in the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
• Erdogan was making it clear that he would not dilute Turkey’s friendship with Pakistan in order to build a new partnership with India.

What was India’s response?

• On its part, Delhi seemed quite unfazed by differences with Erdogan on Pakistan.
• Just before Erdogan arrived in Delhi, India received the president of Cyprus, Nicos Anastasiades, and sent Vice President Hamid Ansari to Armenia.
• Delhi, however, is prepared to complement this hardball diplomacy with a genuine effort to expand areas of cooperation with Turkey, for example, in security and commerce.

What are the potential areas of cooperation?

• Beyond the prospects for cooperation in countering terrorism and extremism, Erdogan is also eager to develop economic and trade ties with India.
• As he deals with a messy neighbourhood in the Middle East, Erdogan has a desire to find new partners like India that can boost Turkey’s economic prospects and lend its foreign policy greater depth.
• For Modi, too, Turkey is an important regional player that must be factored into India’s current recalibration of its Middle East policy.
• The essence of the strategy was to raise their economic and political stakes in India and make Pakistan less salient for the bilateral relationship with Delhi.

What is the way ahead?

• There are three key propositions: One, diplomacy is about making friends into allies, neutrals into friends, and adversaries into neutrals.
• Second, political will and clever diplomacy can alter the perspectives of other nations on issues of vital interest to India.
• Third, as the interests of countries evolve, so will their positions over time.

Source: Indian Express